simonc

Username: simonc

Participant details

	Network Member	Simon Carlile
	Organisation/Institution	University of Sydney
	Department/Centre	Department of Physiology
	Lab	Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory
	Website	http://www.physiol.usyd.edu.au/simonc
	Research area	Audition Auditory Neuroscience
	Research keywords

Research Interests

Simon obtained his PhD from the University of Sydney in 1988 and in 1994 returned to the University of Sydney following 6 years post docotral resarch in Oxford. The Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory has a strong cross disciplinary focus involving bioacoustics, systems modelling, psychophysics and neurophysiology of auditory function. We have made pioneering contributions to the development and applications of virtual auditory space (VAS) technology including the development of novel recording techniques and the use of a localisation performance measure to establish VAS display fidelity. A major stumbling block to more widespread application of VAS is the individual difference in the filter functions of peoples outer ears. A mismatch between the listeners filter functions and those used to render VAS significantly degrades display fidelity. Recent work has culminated in a solution to the long-standing problem of predicting the precise acoustic filtering characteristics from the shape of the outer ear thus obviating the need to make the difficult filter function recordings for every user of a display. This will enable the application of high fidelity displays to a wide range of communications and consumer applications. In addition our research is leveraging these technologies in understanding the complex processes of auditory scene analysis and the so called cocktail party phenomena. Despite the fact that the acoustic environment is comprised multiple concurrent sources that are encoded by 2 ears, the auditory system is able to parse the individual sources and support powerful selective attention to a subset of sound interest.