Pitch and the perceptual organization of sound

Abstract: Pitch plays an important role in music, speech prosody, and source segregation. Despite decades of research, some very basic questions remain about how pitch is coded in the auditory system, and how it is used in sound source segregation.  This talk will describe some recent studies addressing these topics involving the perception of speech and non-speech sounds in complex acoustic backgrounds.

Bio: Andrew Oxenham studied Music and Sound Recording (Tonmeister) at the Unviersity of Surrey (UK) before completing his Ph.D. in 1995 at the University of Cambridge in Experimental Psychology. Since then he held positions at the Institute for Perception Research (The Netherlands), Northeastern University, and MIT before joining the faculty of the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota (USA), where he is currently an Associate Professor and director of the Auditory Perception and Cognition Laboratory. He received the 2001 Bruce Lindsay Award from the Acoustical Society of America, and the 2009 Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences. The main interests of Dr. Oxenham’s research group lie in the area of auditory perception, including pitch, auditory scene analysis, cochlear implants, and the perceptual effects of cochlear hearing loss.