Subject: Re: auditory memory and sound classification From: "f.maintenant" <f.maintenant(at)NTLWORLD.COM> Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 22:49:32 +0100Hadi, 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(at)EC-LYON.FR> To: <AUDITORY(at)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(at)ec-lyon.fr > web: http://perso.ec-lyon.fr/hadi.harb