Cortical linear encoding and decoding of sounds: Similarities and differences between naturalistic speech and music listening.

Linear models are becoming increasingly popular to investigate brain activity in response to continuous and naturalistic stimuli. In the context of auditory perception, these predictive models can be 'encoding', when stimulus features are used to reconstruct brain activity, or 'decoding' when neural features are used to reconstruct the audio stimuli. These linear models are a central component of some brain-computer interfaces that can be integrated into hearing assistive devices (e.

Cortical Auditory Attention Decoding During Music and Speech Listening.

It has been demonstrated that from cortical recordings, it is possible to detect which speaker a person is attending in a cocktail party scenario. The stimulus reconstruction approach, based on linear regression, has been shown to be useable to reconstruct an approximation of the envelopes of the sounds attended to and not attended to by a listener from the electroencephalogram data (EEG). Comparing the reconstructed envelopes with the envelopes of the stimuli, a higher correlation between the envelopes of the attended sound is observed.