How do we follow a conversation in a busy café, or recognize a long-time favourite melody from a musical piece we may not have heard for years? Even though these feats seem natural and effortless to most of us, the acoustic problems to be solved are dauntingly complex. Starting from a description of the acoustic signal and historical attempts to quantify auditory perception, we will cover classic issues such as detection thresholds, masking, pitch, timbre, to progress towards more recent strands of investigation, such as computational models of auditory processing, the consequences of hearing impairment, scene analysis, neural plasticity, memory, attention, speech coding, and music. The aim of such a broad overview, combined with the personal work from students based on discussions of recent publications, is to become aware of the many open and exciting research questions addressed by the field, and to be technically and conceptually equipped to delve more deeply into some of them if needed.

Prerequisites: The course is interdisciplinary (Psychology, Neuroscience, Modelling) but with no formal pre-requisites, so that students from all backgrounds within the master are welcome.

ECTS : 4