Neuromimetic sound representation for percept detection and manipulation

TitleNeuromimetic sound representation for percept detection and manipulation
Publication TypeJournal Articles
Year of Publication2005
AuthorsZotkin DN, Chi T, Shamma SA, Duraiswami R
JournalEURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing
Volume9
Pagination1350 - 1350
Date Published2005///
Abstract

The acoustic wave received at the ears is processed by the human auditory system to separate different sounds along the intensity,pitch, and timbre dimensions. Conventional Fourier-based signal processing, while endowed with fast algorithms, is unable to
easily represent a signal along these attributes. In this paper, we discuss the creation of maximally separable sounds in auditory
user interfaces and use a recently proposed cortical sound representation, which performs a biomimetic decomposition of an
acoustic signal, to represent and manipulate sound for this purpose. We briefly overview algorithms for obtaining, manipulating,
and inverting a cortical representation of a sound and describe algorithms for manipulating signal pitch and timbre separately.
The algorithms are also used to create sound of an instrument between a “guitar” and a “trumpet.” Excellent sound quality can
be achieved if processing time is not a concern, and intelligible signals can be reconstructed in reasonable processing time (about
ten seconds of computational time for a one-second signal sampled at 8 kHz). Work on bringing the algorithms into the real-time
processing domain is ongoing.