Modeling Natural Sounds with Modulation Cascade Processes

Natural sounds are structured on many time-scales. A typical segment of speech, for example, contains features that span four orders of magnitude: Sentences (∼1 s); phonemes (∼10−1 s); glottal pulses (∼10−2 s); and formants ( 10−3 s). The auditory system uses information from each of these time-scales to solve complicated tasks such as auditory scene analysis [1]. One route toward understanding how auditory processing accomplishes this analysis is to build neuroscienceinspired algorithms which solve similar tasks and to compare the properties of these algorithms with properties of auditory processing. There is however a discord: Current machine-audition algorithms largely concentrate on the shorter time-scale structures in sounds, and the longer structures are ignored. The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly, it is a difficult technical problem to construct an algorithm that utilises both sorts of information. Secondly, it is computationally demanding to simultaneously p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: NIPS
• Authors: Richard Turner, Maneesh Sahani
• Keywords: Auditory Processing, Auditory Scene Analysis, Information Technology, Natural Sounds, NIPS 2007