Simon Carlile, University of Sydney
Three main areas will be considered in this course. We will start with a review of the nature or statistics of natural sounds and consider the question of how sensitivity to biologically interesting sounds has evolved. We will review the physiological basis of hearing and consider how the outer and middle ear filter and transform sound before it is transduced into neural signal in the inner ear. The mechno-electrical basis of that transduction and how the information carried by the sound is ultimately encoded and transmitted in the central nervous system will also be reviewed. We will consider how these processes determine the fidelity of our auditory perception.
The second area will focus on the psychophysical basis of hearing and review what is known about our sensitivity to pitch, loudness, timbre and timing aspects of sounds. We will also consider the psychoacoustic basis of our perception of auditory space and look at the coding of sound source direction, distance and sense of spaciousness of the environments. Most of the physiological and psychophysical research which informs the first two sections of this course is carried under controlled listening conditions. In the final section will consider issues relating to the listening in the "real world" and account for the effects of reverberation and for auditory scenes containing multiple concurrent sounds review the roles of spectral grouping and streaming.
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