On Natural Sounds

Statistics of Natural Binaural Sounds

Binaural sound localization is usually considered a discrimination task, where interaural phase (IPD) and level (ILD) disparities at narrowly tuned frequency channels are utilized to identify a position of a sound source. In natural conditions however, binaural circuits are exposed to a stimulation by sound waves originating from multiple, often moving and overlapping sources. Therefore statist...

Natural statistics of binaural sounds

Binaural sound localization is usually considered a discrimination task, where interaural time (ITD) and level (ILD) disparities at pure frequency channels are utilized to identify a position of a sound source. In natural conditions binaural circuits are exposed to a stimulation by sound waves originating from multiple, often moving and overlapping sources. Therefore statistics of binaural cues...

Neural Processing of Natural Sounds

Statistical models for natural sounds

It is important to understand the rich structure of natural sounds in order to solve important tasks, like automatic speech recognition, and to understand auditory processing in the brain. This thesis takes a step in this direction by characterising the statistics of simple natural sounds. We focus on the statistics because perception often appears to depend on them, rather than on the raw wave...

Efficient coding of natural sounds

Introduction Many previous studies in auditory neurophysiology have used simple tonal stimuli to understand how neurons encode sound. While these studies have shed light on many important neural characteristics, pure tones do not typically occur in our environment. Instead, we are often surrounded by multiple sound sources with complex harmonic and transient components such as speech, environme...