Neuromimetic Sound Representation for Percept Detection and Manipulation

• Main Authors: Chi Taishih, Shamma Shihab A, Zotkin Dmitry N, Duraiswami Ramani
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2005-01-01
• Series: EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
• Subjects: anthropomorphic algorithms; pitch detection; human sound perception
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/ASP.2005.1350

<p/> <p>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 <inline-formula><graphic file="1687-6180-2005-486137-i1.gif"/></inline-formula>). Work on bringing the algorithms into the real-time processing domain is ongoing.</p>