A computational model of auditory analysis is described that is inspired by psychoacoustical and neurophysiological findings in early and central stages of the auditory system. The model provides a unified multiresolution representation of the spectral and temporal features likely critical in the perception of sound. Simplified, more specifically tailored versions of this model have already been validated by successful application in the assessment of speech intelligibility [Elhilali et al., Speech Commun. 41(2-3), 331–348 (2003); Chi et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 2719–2732 (1999)] and in explaining the perception of monaural phase sensitivity [R. Carlyon and S. Shamma, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 114, 333–348 (2003)]. Here we provide a more complete mathematical formulation of the model, illustrating how complex signals are transformed through various stages of the model, and relating it to comparable existing models of auditory processing. Furthermore, we outline several reconstruction algorithms to resynthesize the sound from the model output so as to evaluate the fidelity of the representation and contribution of different features and cues to the sound percept.
REFERENCES
1.
Akansu
, A. N.
, and Haddad
, R. A.
(1992
). Multiresolution Signal Decomposition
Academic
, Boston.2.
Amagai
, S.
, Dooling
, R.
, Shamma
, S.
, Kidd
, T.
, and Lohr
, B.
(1999
). “Detection of modulation in spectral envelopes and linear-rippled noises by budgerigars
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
105
, 2029
–2035
.3.
Arai
, T.
, Pavel
, M.
, Hermansky
, H.
, and Avendano
, C.
(1996
). “Intelligibility of speech with filtered time trajectories of spectral envelopes
,” Proc. ICSLP
, pp. 2490
–2492
.4.
Atal
, B. S.
(1974
). “Effectiveness of linear prediction characteristics of the speech wave for automatic speaker identifucation and verification
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
55
, 1304
–1312
.5.
Atlas
, L.
, and Shamma
, S.
(2003
). “Joint acoustic and modulation frequency
,” EURASIP J. Appl. Signal Process.
7
, 668
–675
.6.
Bacon
, S. P.
, and Grantham
, D. W.
(1989
). “Modulation masking: Effects of modulation frequency, depth, and phase
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
85
, 2575
–2580
.7.
Baer
, T.
, and Moore
, B. C. J.
(1993
). “Effects of spectral smearing on the intelligibility of sentences in noise
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
94
, 1229
–1241
.8.
Bates
, R. H. T.
(1984
). “Uniqueness of solutions to two-dimensional fourier phase problems for localized and positive images
,” Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process.
25
, 205
–217
.9.
Calhoun
, B.
, and Schreiner
, C.
(1995
). “Spectral envelope coding in cat primary auditory cortex
,” J. Aud. Neuroscie.
1
, 39
–61
.10.
Carlyon
, R.
, and Shamma
, S.
(2003
). “An account of monaural phase sensitivity
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
114
, 333
–348
.11.
Carney
, L. H.
(1993
). “A model for the responses of low-frequency auditory-nerve fibers in cat
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
93
, 401
–417
.12.
Chi
, T.
(2003
). “Computational Spectro-temporal Auditory Model with Applications to Acoustical Information Processing
,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland
, College Park, MD.13.
Chi
, T.
, Gao
, Y.
, Guyton
, C. G.
, Ru
, P.
, and Shamma
, S.
(1999
). “Spectro-temporal modulation transfer functions and speech intelligibility
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
106
, 2719
–2732
.14.
Cohen
, J. R.
(1989
). “Application of an auditory model to speech recognition
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
85
, 2623
–2633
.15.
Dau
, T.
, Kollmeier
, B.
, and Kohlrausch
, A.
(1997a
). “Modeling auditory processing of amplitude modulation. i. detection and masking with narrow-band carriers
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
102
, 2892
–2905
.16.
Dau
, T.
, Kollmeier
, B.
, and Kohlrausch
, A.
(1997b
). “Modeling auditory processing of amplitude modulation. ii. spectral and temporal integration
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
102
, 2906
–2919
.17.
Dau
, T.
, Puschel
, D.
, and Kohlrausch
, A.
(1996
). “A quantitative model of the effective signal processing in the auditory system. I. Model structure
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
99
, 3615
–3622
.18.
deCharms
, R. C.
, Blake
, D. T.
, and Merzenich
, M. M.
(1998
). “Optimizing sound features for cortical neurons
,” Science
280
(5368
), 1439
–1443
.19.
Depireux
, D.
, Simon
, J.
, Klein
, D.
, and Shamma
, S.
(2001
). “Spectro-temporal response field characterization with dynamic ripples in ferret primary auditory cortex
,” J. Neurophysiol.
85
(3
), 1220
–1234
.20.
deRibaupierre
, F.
, and Rouiller
, E.
(1981
). “Temporal coding of repetitive clicks: presence of rate selective units in the cat’s medial geniculate body (mgb)
,” J. Physiol. (London)
318
, 23
–24
.21.
Drullman
, R.
(1995
). “Temporal envelope and fine structure cues for speech intelligibility
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
97
, 585
–592
.22.
Drullman
, R.
, Festen
, J.
, and Plomp
, R.
(1994
). “Effect of temporal envelope smearing on speech reception
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
95
, 1053
–1064
.23.
Edamatsu
, H.
, Kawasaki
, M.
, and Suga
, N.
(1989
). “Distribution of combination-sensitive neurons in the ventral fringe area of the auditory cortex of the mustached bat
,” J. Neurophysiol.
61
(1
), 202
–207
.24.
Eggermont
, J. J.
(2002
). “Temporal modulation transfer functions in cat primary auditory cortex: Separating stimulus effects from neural mechanisms
,” J. Neurophysiol.
87
, 305
–321
.25.
Elhilali
, M.
, Chi
, T.
, and Shamma
, S. A.
(2003
). “A spectro-temporal modulation index (stmi) for assessment of speech intelligibility
,” Speech Commun.
41
(2–3
), 331
–348
.26.
Elhilali
, M.
, Fritz
, J. B.
, Klein
, D. J.
, Simon
, J. Z.
, and Shamma
, S. A.
(2004
). “Dynamics of precise spike timing in primary auditory cortex
,” J. Neurosci.
24
(5
), 1159
–1172
.27.
Ewert
, S. D.
, and Dau
, T.
(2000
). “Characterizing frequency selectivity for envelope fluctuations
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
108
, 1181
–1196
.28.
Fienup
, J. R.
(1982
). “Phase retrieval algorithms: a comparison
,” Appl. Opt.
21
, 2758
–2769
.29.
Fienup
, J. R.
, and Wackerman
, C. C.
(1987
). “Phase-retrieval stagnation problems and solutions
,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A
3
(11
), 1897
–1907
.30.
Fu
, Q.-J.
, and Shannon
, R. V.
(2000
). “Effect of stimulation rate on phoneme recognition by nucleus-22 cochlear implant listeners
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
107
, 589
–597
.31.
Gerchberg
, R. W.
, and Saxton
, W. O.
(1972
). “A practical algorithm for the determination of phase from image and diffraction plane pictures
,” Optik (Jena)
35
, 237
–246
.32.
Ghitza
, O.
(2001
). “On the upper cutoff frequency of the auditory critical-band envelope detectors in the context of speech perception
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
110
, 1628
–1640
.33.
Green
, D. M.
(1986
). “Frequency and the detection of spectral shape change
,” in Auditory Frequency Selectivity
(Plenum
, New York), pp. 351
–359
.34.
Greenberg
, S.
, and Kingsbury
, B.
(1997
). “The modulation spectrogram: In pursuit of an invariant representation of speech
,” in Proc. ICASSP
, pp. 1647
–1650
.35.
Greenberg
, S.
, Arai
, T.
, and Silipo
, R.
(1998
). “Speech intelligibility derived from exceedingly sparse spectral information
,” in Proc. of the Intl. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing
, Sydney, pp. 2803
–2806
.36.
Grimault
, N.
, Bacon
, S. P.
, and Micheyl
, C.
(2002
). “Auditory stream segregation on the basis of amplitude-modulation rate
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
111
, 1340
–1348
.37.
Hansen
, M.
, and Kollmeier
, B.
(1999
). “Continuous assessment of time-varying speech quality
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
106
, 2888
–2899
.38.
Hayes
, M. H.
(1982
). “The reconstruction of a multidimensional sequence from the phase or magnitude of its fourier transform
,” IEEE Trans. Acoust., Speech, Signal Process.
ASSP-30
(2
), 140
–154
.39.
Hayes
, M. H.
(1987
). “The unique reconstruction of multidimensional sequences from fourier transform magnitude or phase
,” in Image Recovery: Theory and Application
, edited by H.
Stark
(Academic
, San Diego), pp. 195
–230
.40.
Hayes
, M. H.
, Lim
, J. S.
, and Oppenheim
, A. V.
(1980
). “Signal reconstruction from phase or magnitude
,” IEEE Trans. Acoust., Speech, Signal Process.
ASSP-28
(6
), 672
–680
.41.
Hermansky
, H.
, and Morgan
, N.
(1994
). “Rasta processing of speech
,” IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process.
2
(4
), 578
–589
.42.
Houtgast
, T.
(1989
). “Frequency selectivity in amplitude-modulation detection
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
85
(4
), 1676
–1680
.43.
Houtgast
, T.
, Steeneken
, H. J. M.
, and Plomp
, R.
(1980
). “Predicting speech intelligibility in rooms from the modulation transfer function. i. general room acoustics
,” Acustica
46
, 60
–72
.44.
Irino
, T.
, and Kawahara
, H.
(1993
). “Signal reconstruction from modified auditory wavelet transform
,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process.
41
(12
), 3549
–3554
.45.
ITU-T (
2001
). “Perceptual evaluation of speech quality (pesq): an objective method for end-to-end speech quality assessment of narrow-band telephone networks and speech codecs
,” ITU-T Recommendation P.862, February.46.
Jones
, J. P.
, and Palmer
, L. A.
(1987
). “An evaluation of the two-dimensional gabor filter model of simple receptive fields in cat striate cortex
,” J. Neurophysiol.
58
(6
), 1233
–1258
.47.
Joris
, P.
, and Yin
, T. C.
(1992
). “Responses to amplitude-modulated tones in the auditory nerve of the cat
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
91
, 215
–232
.48.
Klein
, D. J.
, Depireux
, D. A.
, Simon
, J. Z.
, and Shamma
, S. A.
(2000
). “Robust spectro temporal reverse correlation for the auditory system: Optimizing stimulus design
,” J. Comput. Neurosci.
9
, 85
–111
.49.
Kleinschmidt
, M.
, Tchorz
, J.
, and Kollmeier
, B.
(2001
). “Combining speech enhancement and auditory feature extraction for robust speech recognition
,” Speech Commun.
34
(1–2
), 75
–91
.50.
Kowalski
, N.
, Depireux
, D.
, and Shamma
, S. A.
(1996
). “Analysis of dynamic spectra in ferret primary auditory cortex: I. Characteristics of single unit responses to moving ripple spectra
,” J. Neurophysiol.
76
(5
), 3503
–3523
.51.
Kryter
, K.
(1962
). “Methods for the calculation and use of the articulation index
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
34
, 1689
–2147
.52.
Langner
, G.
(1992
). “Periodicity coding in the auditory system
,” Hear. Res.
60
, 115
–142
.53.
Langner
, G.
, and Schreiner
, C. E.
(1988
). “Periodicity coding in the inferior colliculus of the cat. I. Neuronal mechanisms
,” J. Neurophysiol.
60
(6
), 1799
–1822
.54.
Levi
, A.
, and Stark
, H.
(1983
). “Signal restoration from phase by projections onto convex sets
,” J. Opt. Soc. Am.
73
(6
), 810
–822
.55.
Levi
, A.
, and Stark
, H.
(1984
). “Image restoration by the method of generalized projections with application to restoration from magnitude
,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A
1
(9
), 932
–943
.56.
Lu
, T.
, Liang
, L.
, and Wang
, X.
(2001
). “Temporal and rate representations of time-varying signals in the auditory cortex of awake primates
,” Nat. Neurosci.
11
, 1131
–1138
.57.
Lyon
, R.
, and Shamma
, S.
(1996
). “Auditory representations of timbre and pitch
,” in Auditory Computation
, edited by H.
Hawkins
, E. T.
McMullen
, A.
Popper
, and R.
Fay
(Springer Verlag
, New York), pp. 221
–270
.58.
Meddis
, R.
, Hewitt
, M. J.
, and Shackleton
, T. M.
(1990
). “Implementation details of a computation model of the inner hair-cell/auditory-nerve synapse
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
87
, 1813
–1816
.59.
Mesgarani
, N.
, and Shamma
, S.
(2005
). “Speech enhancement based on filtering the spectrotemporal modulations
,” in Proc. ICASSP
. Vol. 1, pp. 1105
–1108
.60.
Mesgarani
, N.
, Slaney
, M.
, and Shamma
, S.
(2004
). “Discrimination of speech from non-speech based on multiscale spectro-temporal modulations
,” IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process.
(accepted for publication).61.
Miller
, L. M.
, Escabi
, M. A.
, Read
, H. L.
, and Schreiner
, C. E.
(2002
). “Spectrotemporal receptive fields in the lemniscal auditory thalamus and cortex
,” J. Neurophysiol.
87
(1
), 516
–527
.62.
Mou-yan
, Z.
, and Unbehauen
, R.
(1997
). “Methods for reconstruction of 2-d sequences from fourier transform magnitude
,” IEEE Trans. Image Process.
6
(2
), 222
–233
.63.
Nelken
, I.
, and Versnel
, H.
(2000
). “Responses to linear and logarithmic frequency-modulated sweeps in ferret primary auditory cortex
,” Eur. J. Neurosci.
12
(2
), 549
–562
.64.
Pan
, D.
(1995
). “A tutorial on mpeg audio compression
,” IEEE Multimedia
2
(2
), 60
–74
.65.
Papoulis
, A.
(1975
). “A new algorithm in spectral analysis and band-limited extrapolation
,” IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst.
CAS-22
(9
), 735
–742
.66.
Pfeiffer
, R. R.
, and Kim
, D. O.
(1975
). “Cochlear nerve fiber responses: distributing along the cochlear partition
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
58
, 867
–869
.67.
Pitton
, J. W.
, Wang
, K.
, and Juang
, B.-H.
(1996
). “Time-frequency analysis and auditory modeling for automatic recognition of speech
,” Proc. IEEE
84
(9
), 1199
–1215
.68.
Roberts
, B.
, Glasberg
, B. R.
, and Moore
, B. C. J.
(2002
). “Primitive stream segregation of tone sequences without differences in fundamental frequency or passband
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
112
(5
), 2074
–2085
.69.
Rosen
, S.
(1992
). “Temporal information in speech: acoustic, auditory, and linguistic aspects
,” Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London, Ser. B
336
(10
), 367
–373
.70.
Ru
, P.
(2000
). “Perception-Based Multi-resolution Auditory Processing of Acoustic Signal
,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland
, College Park, MD.71.
Ru
, P.
, and Shamma
, S. A.
(1997
). “Presentation of musical timbre in the auditory cortex
,” J. New Music Res.
26
(2
), 154
–169
.72.
Schreiner
, C. E.
, and Urbas
, J. V.
(1988a
). “Representation of amplitude modulation in the auditory cortex of the cat. i: The anterior field
,” Hear. Res.
21
, 227
–241
.73.
Schreiner
, C. E.
, and Urbas
, J. V.
(1988b
). “Representation of amplitude modulation in the auditory cortex of the cat. ii: Comparison between cortical fields
,” Hear. Res.
32
, 49
–63
.74.
Seldin
, J. H.
, and Fienup
, J. R.
(1990
). “Numerical investigation of the uniqueness of phase retrieval
,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A
7
(3
), 412
–427
.75.
Shamma
, S.
(2003
). “Physiological foundations of temporal integration in the perception of speech
,” J. Phonetics
31
, 495
–501
.76.
Shamma
, S.
, Chadwick
, R.
, Wilbur
, J.
, Morrish
, K.
, and Rinzel
, J.
(1986
). “A biophysical model of cochlear processing: Intensity dependence of pure tone responses
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
80
, 133
–145
.77.
Shamma
, S. A.
(1985a
). “Speech processing in the auditory system I: The representation of speech in the response of the auditory nerve
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
78
, 1612
–1621
.78.
Shamma
, S. A.
(1985b
). “Speech processing in the auditory system II: Lateral inhibition and the central processing of speech evoked activity in the auditory nerve
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
78
, 1622
–1632
.79.
Shamma
, S. A.
(1989
). “Spatial and temporal processing in central auditory networks
,” in Methods in Neuronal Modeling
, edited by C.
Koch
and I.
Segev
(MIT
, Cambridge, MA), pp. 247
–289
.80.
Shamma
, S. A.
, Versnel
, H.
, and Kowalski
, N.
(1995
). “Ripple analysis in the ferret auditory cortex: I. Response characteristics of single units to sinusoidally rippled spectra
,” J. Aud. Neurosci.
1
(2
), 233
–254
.81.
Shamma
, S. A.
, Fleshman
, J. W.
, Wiser
, P. R.
, and Versnal
, H.
(1993
). “Organization of the response areas in ferret primary auditory cortex
,” J. Neurophysiol.
69
(2
), 367
–383
.82.
Shannon
, R. V.
, Zeng
, F.-G.
, Wygonski
, J.
, Kamath
, V.
, and Ekelid
, M.
(1995
). “Speech recognition with primarily temporal cues
,” Science
270
, 303
–304
.83.
Sheft
, S.
, and Yost
, W.
(1990
). “Temporal integration in amplitude modulation detection
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
88
, 796
–805
.84.
Slaney
, M.
(1998
). “Auditory toolbox: Version 2
,” Technical Report 1998-010, Interval Research Corporation.85.
Slaney
, M.
, Naar
, D.
, and Lyon
, R. F.
(1994
). “Auditory model inversion for sound separation
,” in Proc. ICASSP
, Vol. II
, pp. 77
–80
.86.
Smith
, Z. M.
, Delgutte
, B.
, and Oxenham
, A. J.
(2002
). “Chimaeric sounds reveal dichotomies in auditory perception
,” Nature (London)
416
(6876
), 87
–90
.87.
Tchorz
, J.
, and Kollmeier
, B.
(1999
). “A model of auditory perception as front end for automatic speech recognition
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
106
, 2040
–2050
.88.
ter Keurs
, M.
, Festen
, J. M.
, and Plomp
, R.
(1992
). “Effect of spectral envelope smearing on speech reception. I
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
91
, 2872
–2880
.89.
Ulanovsky
, N.
, Las
, L.
, and Nelken
, I.
(2003
). “Processing of low-probability sounds by cortical neurons
,” Nat. Neurosci.
6
, 391
–398
.90.
Viemeister
, N. F.
(1979
). “Temporal modulation transfer functions based upon modulation thresholds
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
66
, 1364
–1380
.91.
Wang
, K.
, and Shamma
, S. A.
(1994
). “Self-normalization and noise-robustness in early auditory representations
,” IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process.
2
(3
), 421
–435
.92.
Wang
, K.
, and Shamma
, S. A.
(1995
). “Representation of spectral profiles in primary auditory cortex
,” IEEE Trans. Speech Audio Process.
3
(5
), 382
–395
.93.
Watson
, A. B.
, and Ahumada
, A. J.
(1985
). “Model of human visual-motion sensing
,” J. Opt. Soc. Am. A
2
(2
), 322
–342
.94.
Westerman
, L. A.
, and Smith
, R. L.
(1984
). “Rapid and short term adaptation in auditory nerve responses
,” Hear. Res.
15
, 249
–260
.95.
Yang
, X.
, Wang
, K.
, and Shamma
, S. A.
(1992
). “Auditory representations of acoustic signals
,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory
38
(2
), 824
–839
.© 2005 Acoustical Society of America.
2005
Acoustical Society of America
You do not currently have access to this content.
