Identifying sound sources is fundamental to developing a stable representation of the environment in the face of variable auditory information. The cortical processes underlying this ability have received little attention. In two fMRI experiments, we investigated passive adaptation to (Exp. 1) and explicit discrimination of (Exp. 2) source identities for different categories of auditory objects...

Nonlinear signal processing is an integral part of sensory transduction in the nervous system. Sensory inputs are analog, continuous-time signals with a large dynamic range, whereas central neurons encode information with limited dynamic range and temporal specificity, using fixed-width, fixed-height pulses. Sensory transduction uses nonlinear signal processing to reduce real-world input to a n...

We present the first demonstration of the recording of optically encoded audio onto a plasmonic nanostructure. Analogous to the "optical sound" approach used in the early twentieth century to store sound on photographic film, we show that arrays of gold, pillar-supported bowtie nanoantennas could be used in a similar fashion to store sound information that is transferred via an amplitude modula...

Everyday listening involves a complex interplay between the ear, which transduces sound energy into neural responses, and the brain, which makes sense of these inputs. Historically, research on the ear tended to ignore the fact that what we can perceive in sound depends on what task the brain is engaged by, while research on cortical processing of sound ignored the complexity and sophistication...

This paper presents the sound archive of dialectal varieties of spoken Basque called BIZKAIFON. This database contains sound archives with their associated information and it is accessible via a web interface. A prototype of BIZKAIFON is available at http://bizkaifon.ehu.es/.

Neurophysiological animal models suggest that anterior auditory cortex (AC) areas process sound identity information, whereas posterior ACs specialize in sound location processing. In humans, inconsistent neuroimaging results and insufficient causal evidence have challenged the existence of such parallel AC organization. Here we transiently inhibit bilateral anterior or posterior AC areas using...