Generalization of auditory expertise in audio engineers and instrumental musicians.

From auditory perception to general cognition, the ability to play a musical instrument has been associated with skills both related and unrelated to music. However, it is unclear if these effects are bound to the specific characteristics of musical instrument training, as little attention has been paid to other populations such as audio engineers and designers whose auditory expertise may match or surpass that of musicians in specific auditory tasks or more naturalistic acoustic scenarios. We explored this possibility by comparing students of audio engineering (n = 20) to matched conservatory-trained instrumentalists (n = 24) and to naive controls (n = 20) on measures of auditory discrimination, auditory scene analysis, and speech in noise perception.

Repetition detection and rapid auditory learning for stochastic tone clouds.

Stochastic sounds are useful to probe auditory memory, as they require listeners to learn unpredictable and novel patterns under controlled experimental conditions. Previous studies using white noise or random click trains have demonstrated rapid auditory learning. Here, we explored perceptual learning with a more parametrically variable stimulus.

Auditory memory for random time patterns.

The acquisition of auditory memory for temporal patterns was investigated. The temporal patterns were random sequences of irregularly spaced clicks. Participants performed a task previously used to study auditory memory for noise [Agus, Thorpe, and Pressnitzer (2010).

Voice selectivity in the temporal voice area despite matched low-level acoustic cues.

In human listeners, the temporal voice areas (TVAs) are regions of the superior temporal gyrus and sulcus that respond more to vocal sounds than a range of nonvocal control sounds, including scrambled voices, environmental noises, and animal cries. One interpretation of the TVA's selectivity is based on low-level acoustic cues: compared to control sounds, vocal sounds may have stronger harmonic content or greater spectrotemporal complexity. Here, we show that the right TVA remains selective to the human voice even when accounting for a variety of acoustical cues.

Fast response to human voices in autism.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are reported to allocate less spontaneous attention to voices. Here, we investigated how vocal sounds are processed in ASD adults, when those sounds are attended. Participants were asked to react as fast as possible to target stimuli (either voices or strings) while ignoring distracting stimuli.

Language Experience Affects Grouping of Musical Instrument Sounds.

Language experience clearly affects the perception of speech, but little is known about whether these differences in perception extend to non-speech sounds. In this study, we investigated rhythmic perception of non-linguistic sounds in speakers of French and German using a grouping task, in which complexity (variability in sounds, presence of pauses) was manipulated. In this task, participants grouped sequences of auditory chimeras formed from musical instruments.

Perceptual learning of acoustic noise generates memory-evoked potentials.

Experience continuously imprints on the brain at all stages of life. The traces it leaves behind can produce perceptual learning [1], which drives adaptive behavior to previously encountered stimuli. Recently, it has been shown that even random noise, a type of sound devoid of acoustic structure, can trigger fast and robust perceptual learning after repeated exposure [2].

Isolating informational masking in both pure and complex tone sequences.

Objectives: Interference between a target and simultaneous maskers occurs both at the cochlear level through energetic masking and more centrally through informational masking (IM). Hence, quantifying the amount of IM requires a strict control of the energetic component. Presenting target and maskers on different sides (i.

Representations of specific acoustic patterns in the auditory cortex and hippocampus.

Previous behavioural studies have shown that repeated presentation of a randomly chosen acoustic pattern leads to the unsupervised learning of some of its specific acoustic features. The objective of our study was to determine the neural substrate for the representation of freshly learnt acoustic patterns. Subjects first performed a behavioural task that resulted in the incidental learning of three different noise-like acoustic patterns.

Auditory gist: recognition of very short sounds from timbre cues.

Sounds such as the voice or musical instruments can be recognized on the basis of timbre alone. Here, sound recognition was investigated with severely reduced timbre cues. Short snippets of naturally recorded sounds were extracted from a large corpus.

Perceptual learning of acoustic noise by individuals with dyslexia.

Purpose: A phonological deficit is thought to affect most individuals with developmental dyslexia. The present study addresses whether the phonological deficit is caused by difficulties with perceptual learning of fine acoustic details.

Method: A demanding test of nonverbal auditory memory, "noise learning," was administered to both adults with dyslexia and control adult participants.

The detection of repetitions in noise before and after perceptual learning.

In noise repetition-detection tasks, listeners have to distinguish trials of continuously running noise from trials in which noise tokens are repeated in a cyclic manner. Recently, it has been shown that using the exact same noise token across several trials ("reference noise") facilitates the detection of repetitions for this token [Agus et al. (2010).

Processing of short auditory stimuli: the rapid audio sequential presentation paradigm (RASP).

Human listeners seem to be remarkably able to recognise acoustic sound sources based on timbre cues. Here we describe a psychophysical paradigm to estimate the time it takes to recognise a set of complex sounds differing only in timbre cues: both in terms of the minimum duration of the sounds and the inferred neural processing time. Listeners had to respond to the human voice while ignoring a set of distractors.

Fast recognition of musical sounds based on timbre.

Human listeners seem to have an impressive ability to recognize a wide variety of natural sounds. However, there is surprisingly little quantitative evidence to characterize this fundamental ability. Here the speed and accuracy of musical-sound recognition were measured psychophysically with a rich but acoustically balanced stimulus set.

Importance of temporal-envelope speech cues in different spectral regions.

This study investigated the ability to use temporal-envelope (E) cues in a consonant identification task when presented within one or two frequency bands. Syllables were split into five bands spanning the range 70-7300 Hz with each band processed to preserve E cues and degrade temporal fine-structure cues. Identification scores were measured for normal-hearing listeners in quiet for individual processed bands and for pairs of bands.

Rapid formation of robust auditory memories: insights from noise.

Before a natural sound can be recognized, an auditory signature of its source must be learned through experience. Here we used random waveforms to probe the formation of new memories for arbitrary complex sounds. A behavioral measure was designed, based on the detection of repetitions embedded in noises up to 4 s long.

Informational masking in young and elderly listeners for speech masked by simultaneous speech and noise.

Three experiments measured the effects of age on informational masking of speech by competing speech. The experiments were designed to minimize the energetic contributions of the competing speech so that informational masking could be measured with no large corrections for energetic masking. Experiment 1 used a "speech-in-speech-in-noise" design, in which the competing speech was presented in noise at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of -4 dB.

An analysis of the masking of speech by competing speech using self-report data.

Many of the items in the "Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing" scale questionnaire [S. Gatehouse and W. Noble, Int.