This book contains the papers that were presented at the XIIIth International Symposium on Hearing (ISH), which was held in Dourdan, France, between August 24 and 29, 2003. From its first edition in 1969, the Symposium has had a distinguished tradition of bringing together auditory psychologists and physiologists. Hearing science now also includes computational modeling and brain imaging, and this is reflected in the papers collected. The rich interactions between participants during the meeting were yet another indication of the appositeness of the original idea to confront approaches around shared scientific issues. A total of 62 solicited papers are included, organized into 12 broad thematic areas ranging from cochlear signal processing to plasticity and perceptual learning. The themes follow the sessions and the chronological order of the paper presentations during the symposium. A notable feature of the ISH books is the transcription of the discussions between participants. A draft version of the book is circulated before the meeting, and all participants are invited to make written comments, before or during the presentations. This particularity is perhaps what makes the ISH book series so valuable as a truthful picture of the evolution of issues in hearing science. We tried to uphold this tradition, which was all the easier because of the excellent scientific content of the discussions.

When Speech and Audio Signal Processing published in 1999, it stood out from its competition in its breadth of coverage and its accessible, intutiont-based style. This book was aimed at individual students and engineers excited about the broad span of audio processing and curious to understand the available techniques. Since then, with the advent of the iPod in 2001, the field of digital audio and music has exploded, leading to a much greater interest in the technical aspects of audio processing. This Second Edition will update and revise the original book to augment it with new material describing both the enabling technologies of digital music distribution (most significantly the MP3) and a range of exciting new research areas in automatic music content processing (such as automatic transcription, music similarity, etc.) that have emerged in the past five years, driven by the digital music revolution. New chapter topics include: Psychoacoustic Audio Coding, describing MP3 and related audio coding schemes based on psychoacoustic masking of quantization noise Music Transcription, including automatically deriving notes, beats, and chords from music signals. Music Information Retrieval, primarily focusing on audio-based genre classification, artist/style identification, and similarity estimation. Audio Source Separation, including multi-microphone beamforming, blind source separation, and the perception-inspired techniques usually referred to as Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA).

Designed to follow an introductory text on psychoacoustics, this book takes readers through the mathematics of signal processing from its beginnings in the Fourier transform to advanced topics in modulation, dispersion relations, minimum phase systems, sampled data, and nonlinear distortion. While organised like an introductory engineering text on signals, the examples and exercises come from research on the perception of sound. A unique feature of this book is its consistent application of the Fourier transform, which unifies topics as diverse as cochlear filtering and digital recording. More than 250 exercises are included, many of them devoted to practical research in perception, while others explore surprising auditory illusions generated by special signals. Periodic signals, aperiodic signals, and noise -- along with their linear and nonlinear transformations -- are covered in detail. More advanced mathematical topics are treated in the appendices. A working knowledge of elementary calculus is the only prerequisite. Indispensable for researchers and advanced students in the psychology of auditory perception.

This book explains neural function at the level of ion channels and membrane excitability in neurons along the ascending auditory pathway. Airborne sound information is captured by the ears, transformed to neural electrical signals, and then processed in the brain. Readers will find full descriptions of these processes of signal transduction and transformation. First, it is described how, at the level of hair cells, the receptor cells in the cochlea, the sound-evoked vibration is transduced to electrical signals and transmitted to the auditory nerve fibers. In the second section it is explained how the electrical activity of these fibers is processed at the cochlear nucleus in order to extract the temporal and level information of sound separately and then transmitted to the third nucleus for processing of the interaural differences, such as the interaural time difference and the interaural level difference. The third section summarizes the transformation of auditory temporal information to the rate of neural firing activity in the midbrain and the higher nuclei, including the cortex, based on in vivo results. Finally, emerging new technologies to investigate auditory signal processing are reviewed and discussed.

An integrated overview of hearing and the interplay of physical, biological, and psychological processes underlying it. Every time we listen—to speech, to music, to footsteps approaching or retreating—our auditory perception is the result of a long chain of diverse and intricate processes that unfold within the source of the sound itself, in the air, in our ears, and, most of all, in our brains. Hearing is an "everyday miracle" that, despite its staggering complexity, seems effortless. This book offers an integrated account of hearing in terms of the neural processes that take place in different parts of the auditory system. Because hearing results from the interplay of so many physical, biological, and psychological processes, the book pulls together the different aspects of hearing—including acoustics, the mathematics of signal processing, the physiology of the ear and central auditory pathways, psychoacoustics, speech, and music—into a coherent whole.

"Spectral Audio Signal Processing is the fourth book in the music signal processing series by Julius O. Smith. One can say that human hearing occurs in terms of spectral models. As a result, spectral models are especially useful in audio applications. For example, with the right spectral model, one can discard most of the information contained in a sound waveform without changing how it sounds. This is the basis of modern audio compression techniques."--Publisher's description.