Re: auditory memory and sound classification

["f.maintenant" <f.maintenant@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hadi, I've just found this obvious reference:

S. McAdams and E. Bigand, Thinking Sound, Oxford University Press 1993.
It includes a chapter by Robert G. Crowder, Auditory memory, pp. 113-145,
but all the book should be useful to you.

Sorry, I should have thought of this reference earlier. The book was
originally published in French if I'm not wrong.

Fred

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hadi Harb" <Hadi.Harb@EC-LYON.FR>
To: <AUDITORY@LISTS.MCGILL.CA>
Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 7:32 PM
Subject: auditory memory and sound classification


> Dear list,
>
> During my PhD thesis I was working on developing a general audio
classifier
> for multimedia applications. I started from the supposition that if we
model
> some aspects of the way humans classify audio semantic classes (in our
> context semantic class means: speech, music, jazz, man, action.) while
> building an audio classifier will be advantageous. In two experiments I
made
> for the human discrimination capability between speech/music and
> man(speech)/woman(speech) the context and the duration of the stimuli
> affected seriously the discrimination judgments by the subjects. For
> example, a short speech stimulus (70ms) presented after a 900ms music
> stimulus was not noticed by the subjects in the majority of cases
(similarly
> to the spectral contrast in speech recognition).
> From an engineering perspective I supposed that some kind of integration
of
> the spectral activity over time exists (we suppose for instance a simple
> model of the ear consisting of estimating and transferring the energy
> information into different frequency bands to be processed by the cortex).
I
> supposed then an auditory memory model consisting of some kind of a mean
> (accumulation) and a variance (surprise) of the past spectral energy in
> different frequency bands. This model, although very simplistic and based
> only on intuition, when used as the basis for audio signal feature
> extraction was shown to have interesting properties for general audio
> classification in multimedia indexing applications.
>
> I was wondering if we can suppose from a scientific point of view that
human
> subjects when classifying a stimulus into high level concepts (rain,
> explosion, speech) base their judgments on the auditory memory state (the
> integration and correlation of the past spectral activities for instance)
> which is updated continuously by new acoustic activities. Also I would
like
> to know if such auditory memory models exist.
>
> I am seeking clarification, directions, and references about the effect of
> the auditory memory models on the human perception of general sound if
> possible.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Hadi Harb
>  Dept. Mathematiques - Informatique,
>  ECOLE CENTRALE DE LYON
>  36, av Guy de Collongue,
>  69134 Ecully France EUROPE
>  tel: +33 (0)4.72.18.64.59
>  fax: +33 (0)4.78.33.16.15
>  e-mail: hadi.harb@ec-lyon.fr
>  web: http://perso.ec-lyon.fr/hadi.harb