AUDL 4007 – 2014
Auditory perception
Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences
Division of Psychology & Language Sciences, UCL
Chandler House
2 Wakefield Street
London WC1N 1PF
This unit will provide advanced training in aspects of auditory perception that
are particularly relevant to understanding both normal and impaired auditory
function. An emphasis will be placed on the fundamental aspects of hearing such
as frequency analysis, temporal analysis, pitch perception, intensity
perception and binaural processing.
Course Structure: The course is run in the second term only, typically
on Thursday afternoons, starting in January 2014. There is no meeting on 27
February but there will be one on 20 February, even though it is reading week.
The course comprises a mixture of lectures, demonstrations, laboratory sessions
and tutorials. Unless otherwise noted, lectures will be given by Professor
Stuart Rosen.
Venue and scheduling: Most sessions
start at 14:00 in Chandler House, taking
place in Room B07, the basement teaching laboratory. However, the first session
will be at 15:00 on Tuesday January 14th in the Ear Institute Lecture Theatre,
and the second will be at 11:15 on Wednesday January 15th in room G33 at the
Ear Institute.
Timetable
| Week |
Date |
Lecture Topic |
Laboratory |
Course Work (CW) |
| 1 |
14 January
Tuesday
15:00 LT EI
|
Introduction to the course
The auditory periphery
Mathematical interlude: continuous spectra and adding levels
|
|
Choose a paper |
| 1 |
15 January
Wednesday
11:15 G33
|
Envelope & Temporal Fine Structure (TFS) |
|
|
| 1 |
16 January
Thursday
14:00
|
|
Review signals & systems
A cochlear simulation
|
|
| 2 |
23 January |
No meeting |
|
Paper approved by 27 Jan |
| 3 |
30 January |
Pitch perception (Prof A Faulkner) |
Measuring fundamental frequency in various sounds |
|
| 4 |
6 February |
No meeting |
|
Hand in CW 1 by noon on 7 February |
| 5 |
13 February |
Frequency selectivity
Intensity & Loudness
|
Measuring frequency selectivity using notched noise |
CW 1 returned with comments |
| 6 |
20 February |
Temporal resolution |
Adaptive techniques using gap detection |
CW 1 handed in re-written |
| 7 |
27 February |
Psychoacoustics of hearing impairment |
|
Choose paper 2 |
| 8 |
6 March |
Cochlear Implants |
Listening to speech in noise with cochlear implant simulations |
Paper 2 approved by now
|
| 9 |
13 March |
Auditory Scene Analysis (Dr M Chait) |
|
|
| 10 |
20 March |
Binaural hearing (Prof D McAlpine) |
|
Bring essay 2 for reading in lab |
| 11 |
27 March |
Hearing speech in noise |
Listening to speech in different kinds of 'noise' |
CW 2 handed in re-written |
Staff
| Stuart Rosen |
020 7679 7404 |
stuart@phon.ucl.ac.uk |
course organiser |
| Steve Nevard |
020 7679 3156 |
s.nevard@ucl.ac.uk |
experimental officer |
| Dave Cushing |
020 7679 7400 |
d.cushing@ucl.ac.uk |
laboratory technician |
Main text: Plack C. (2005) The Sense of Hearing. Erlbaum.
Supplementary Reading
- BCJ Moore (ed) (1986) Frequency Selectivity in Hearing. London:
Academic Press. Does what it says on the tin, with thorough accounts of the
psychoacoustics of frequency selectivity, plus more.
- S Gelfand (2004) Hearing: An Introduction to Psychological and
Physiological Acoustics, Fourth Edition, Revised and Expanded. A nearly
complete resource for anatomy, physiology and psychoacoustics. Especially
good on the middle ear.
- R Plomp (2002) The Intelligent Ear, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah New
Jersey. A very accessible account of hearing.
- BCJ Moore (2003). An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing, 5th
ed. (Academic Press). A very complete guide to the literature, but at
an advanced level.
- WA Yost (2006) Fundamentals of Hearing: An Introduction, 5th ed.
(Academic Press). A more elementary exposition. Particularly good on the
anatomy & physiology.
- J Schnupp, E Nelken & A King (2010) Auditory Neuroscience: Making Sense of Sound
(MIT Press). A new book with much more discussion of the neural
substrates of perception, and focus on a more limited range of topics.
Worth a look. There is also an extensive web
site containing animations and demonstrations.
- D Moore, P Fuchs, A Palmer, A Rees & C Plack (2010) Oxford
Handbook of Auditory Science: The Ear, The Auditory Brain, Hearing
Assessment for the BSc and PLING 304
- 2 pieces of coursework, each worth 15% of the final mark (max 1000 words
each), both based on doing the work of a science journalist by summarising
a chosen paper in a style suitable for a quality daily newspaper. You will
received feedback on one version of this, and re-write.
- A 2-hour written paper (70%)
You must pass the final exam to pass the course.
Final exam
The final exam for the BSc students will take place in the main exam period. It
will consist of a set of 6 essay type questions, of which you must answer 5.
This allows 24 mins/question. Generally speaking, there is a straightforward
question associated with one or more lecture topics, as for the exams in 2009 and 2008. The exam in 2007 was in a
slightly different format.
Here are some example questions
with tips for model answers.
Course work
Write two articles for a lay audience summarizing the crucial results of a
journal article relevant to this course, in a style appropriate for a quality
daily newspaper The use of graphics and diagrams is more than welcome, but is
not required. Below you will find a few articles that would be appropriate, but
please choose your own. You must email the .pdf first so I can assess its
suitability. A good source of relevant papers can be found in the following
journals, although other,more general journals, can sometimes have appropriate
studies too (e.g., Nature and Science). You can gain access to these through
the UCL library page http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Library/ejournal/ejtitle.shtml
- Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in the Psychological
Acoustics section. This is the pre-eminent journal in the field with a wide
variety of studies concerning both normal and impaired hearing.
- Ear & Hearing Oriented more towards clinically-relevant
issues.
- International Journal of Audiology
- JARO (Journal of the Association for Research in
Otolaryngology)
- Hearing Research
- Audiology & Neuro-otology
- Attention, Perception & Psychophysics (formerly known as
Perception & Psychophysics )
The following are examples of articles that would be appropriate, but please do
not use these. Get an article from within last 3 years or so. Ensure that the
articule you select is not a review article in which much of the work is done
for you already! It must be a primary research paper, although an appropriate
meta-analysis of a some clinical procedure might be OK. Read any article you
propose to use beforehand to ensure that it can be explained to a lay audience!
Note that you may need to read ahead of the syllabus for some topics.
- Baker, R. J. & Rosen, S. (2002). Auditory filter
nonlinearity in mild/moderate hearing impairment. Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America, 111, 1330-1339.
- Kong, Y. Y., Cruz, R., Jones, J. A., & Zeng, F. G. (2004).Music
perception with temporal cues in acoustic and electric hearing. Ear and Hearing, 25, 173-185.
- Musiek, F. E., Shinn, J.
B., Jirsa, R., Bamiou, D. E., Baran, J.
A., & Zaidan, E. (2005). GIN
(Gaps-In-Noise) test performance in subjects with confirmed central
auditory nervous system involvement. Ear and Hearing, 26, 608-618.
- Neuman, A. C., Haravon,
A., Sislian, N., & Waltzman, S. B. (2007). Sound-direction identification with bilateral cochlear
implants. Ear and Hearing,
28, 73-82.
- van Hoesel, R., Ramsden, R., & O'Driscoll, M. (2002). Sound-direction identification, interaural time delay
discrimination, and speech intelligibility advantages in noise for a
bilateral cochlear implant user. Ear and Hearing, 23, 137-149.
- Yasin, I. & Plack, C.
J. (2005). Psychophysical tuning curves at very high frequencies. Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America, 118, 2498-2506.
Articles should be 1000 words or less. Your article should introduce the basic
topic and discuss the motivation of the author(s) in doing the study, as well
report the results and their implications. Ensure you use language any
reasonably well-educated person could understand. Do not simply paraphrase (or
outright plagiarise!) the author(s). Unlike an article in the popular press,
you should have a reference list. An appropriate style can be found in this example, this one or this one, all from Nature News. Again, use the library page
to access the ejournal and locate the full article by date.
You will submit your work in hard copy and in an email to me. Please also
submit a hard copy of the article your essay was based on. For the BSc
Audiology and any others doing both pieces of coursework, the following
deadlines are crucial:
- 22 January: Choose a paper and email the title and the
pdf to stuart@phon.ucl.ac.uk for approval
- 6 February: Hand in essay 1
- 13 February: Essay 1 returned with comments
- 20 February: Hand in rewritten final version of essay 1 to be marked
- 27 February: After looking at the comments on essay 1, choose and have
approved a second paper (in a different topic area) by email to
stuart@phon.ucl.ac.uk
- 20 March: Bring two hard copies (double-spaced) of essay 2 to the lab
session, where fellow students will read them and give you feedback.
Also please bring in one hard copy of the paper you are discussing.
- 27 March: Hand in final version of essay 2 to be marked
Week by Week
This website will be updated frequently though the term. You can see how the
teaching in previous years has run for 2013, 2012 and 2011. Journal articles that are suggested reading are
readily accessible through the reading list in Moodle.
Week 1: Introduction to the course, a review of peripheral auditory
physiology & technical preludes to frequency selectivity
Suggested readings
- You need to be reasonably familiar with the basic concepts of signals
& systems analysis, as detailed in Signals and Systems for Speech and Hearing. A lab
session later in the week will review this material.
- Chapters 1-3 in Plack also summarise the basic aspects of acoustics,
signals & systems you need to be familiar with, with Chapter 4 covering
the basic physiology.
- Schnupp et al. too cover these areas well, with a different focus and
more emphasis on the physiology of the ear.
- Yost's chapters 6-9 on the anatomy and physiology are very clear,
extensive and easy to get to grips with.
- Chapter 12 in Signals and Systems for Speech and Hearing, 2nd
edition gives a thorough summary of the ear as a signal
processor.
Week 2: Envelope and Temporal Fine Structure (TFS) & Frequency
Selectivity
Suggested readings
- Rosen, S. (1992) Temporal information in speech: Acoustic, auditory and
linguistic aspects. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London, Series B, 336: 367-373.
- Ch 5 in Plack.
Week 3: Pitch perception (Prof A Faulkner)
Read Ch 7 in Plack and Ch 3 in Schnupp et al.
Week 4: Intensity and loudness
Read Ch 6 in Plack.
Week 5: Temporal resolution
Read Ch 8 in Plack.
Week 6: Psychoacoustics of hearing impairment
For more on the psychoacoustics of hearing impairment (available through the reading List on Moodle), read:
- Moore, B. C. J. (1987). "Psychophysics of Normal and Impaired Hearing,"
British Medical Bulletin 43, 887-908.
- Moore, B. C. J. (1996). "Perceptual consequences of cochlear hearing loss
and their implications for the design of hearing," Ear and Hearing 17,
133-161.
- Moore, B. C. J. (2002). "Psychoacoustics of normal and impaired hearing,"
British Medical Bulletin 63, 121-134.
This is a really excellent summary about auditory compression and hearing loss and this short
article describes dead regions in a very informative way.
Week 7: Cochlear implants
Suggested readings
- Chapter 8 in Schnupp et al. 'Auditory Prostheses: From the Lab to the Clinic and Back Again'.
Associated web site here.
- A good overview:
Wilson, B. S. & Dorman, M. F. (2008). Cochlear implants: Current designs and future possibilities.
Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development, 45, 695-730.
- Although a little bit out-of-date, most of the basic concepts are explained well in here. Perhaps useful only to read up to about p 6:
Loizou, P. C. (1999). "Introduction to cochlear implants," IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine 18, 32-42.
- More than you want to know about speech processing schemes:
Loizou, P. C. (1999b).
"Signal-processing techniques for cochlear implants - A review of progress in deriving electrical stimuli from the speech signal,"
IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine 18, 34-46.
- Although I haven't read it myself, this book comes highly recommended if you really want to learn a lot about CIs:
Programming Cochlear Implants (Core Clincal Concepts in
Audiology) Jace Wolfe & Ein Schafer
Publication Date: March 31, 2010 (ISBN-10: 1597563722,
ISBN-13: 978-1597563727)
Week 8: Auditory Scene Analysis (Dr M Chait)
Suggested readings
- Ch 10 in Plack
-
Bregman, A. S. (1993). "Auditory scene analysis: Listening in complex environments,"
in Thinking in Sound, edited by McAdams, S. E. and Bigand, E. (Oxford University Press,London), pp.10-36.
- Ch 6 in Schnupp et al. might also be useful, and the
accompanying web site has some good demonstrations.
- A very extensive description about ASA, with lots of interesting audio demonstrations, can be found on this
web site by Al Bregman.
Week 9: Binaural hearing (Prof D McAlpine)
Read Ch 9 in Plack. Ch 5 in Schnupp et al. could also be useful.
Week 10: Hearing speech in noise
Read this excellent paper (available through the reading List on Moodle) about energetic and informational masking:
Shinn-Cunningham, B. G. (2008). "Object-based auditory and visual attention," Trends Cog. Sci. p 12, 182-186.
Term ends 28 March 2013
Other links to material concerning relevant topics
( will open in a new browser window)
|