To understand the neural representation of broadband, dynamic sounds in primary auditory cortex (AI), we characterize responses using the spectro-temporal response field (STRF). The STRF describes, predicts, and fully characterizes the linear dynamics of neurons in response to sounds with rich spectro-temporal envelopes. It is computed from the responses to elementary "ripples," a family of sou...

In colonial species, recognition of offspring should be under strong selection. For accurate identification to occur offspring must emit individually distinctive signals and parents must be able to discriminate between signals. Female greater spear-nosed bats (Phyllostomus hastatus) roost in stable social groups and use infant vocalizations, termed isolation calls, to locate and identify their ...

Automatic recognition of human emotion in speech aims at recognizing the underlying emotional state of a speaker from the speech signal. The area has received rapidly increasing research interest over the past few years. However, designing powerful spectral features for high-performance speech emotion recognition (SER) remains an open challenge. Most spectral features employed in current SER te...

A preliminary set of experiments are described in which a biologically-inspired computer vision system (Serre, Wolf et al. 2005; Serre 2006; Serre, Oliva et al. 2006; Serre, Wolf et al. 2006) designed for visual object recognition was applied to the task of phonetic classification. During learning, the system processed 2-D wideband magnitude spectrograms directly as images, producing a set of 2...

Echolocation is the ability to use sound-echoes to infer spatial information about the environment. Some blind people have developed extraordinary proficiency in echolocation using mouth-clicks. The first step of human biosonar is the transmission (mouth click) and subsequent reception of the resultant sound through the ear. Existing head-related transfer function (HRTF) data bases provide desc...

We present a 2-D spectro-temporal Gabor filterbank based on the 2-D Fast Fourier Transform, and show how it may be used to analyze localized patches of a spectrogram. We argue that the 2-D Gabor filterbank has the capacity to decompose a patch into its underlying dominant spectro-temporal components, and we illustrate the response of our filterbank to different speech phenomena such as harmonic...

The spectro-temporal receptive field [Hear. Res 5 (1981) 147; IEEE Trans BME 15 (1993) 177] provides an explicit image of the spectral and temporal aspects of the responsiveness of a primary auditory afferent axon. It exhibits the net effects of the competition between excitatory and inhibitory (or suppressive) phenomena. In this paper, we introduce a method for derivation of the spectro-tempor...

The ability of human listeners to detect and discriminate spectro-temporal ripples in sound has been shown to be correlated with speech intelligibility performance in several conditions. Thus, if a model would be able to account for the spectro-temporal processing limits in the auditory system, such a framework could be used to analyze the auditory processes contributing to and limiting speech ...

Timbre is the attribute of sound that allows humans and other animals to distinguish among different sound sources. Studies based on psychophysical judgments of musical timbre, ecological analyses of sound's physical characteristics as well as machine learning approaches have all suggested that timbre is a multifaceted attribute that invokes both spectral and temporal sound features. Here, we e...