Background

Although our sense of hearing has long been the subject of intensive scientific inquiry, computational methods have only recently been applied to this intellectual domain with the degree of sophistication and systematic development required for achieving significant gains in scientific understanding. The complexity of the physiological and anatomical substrates of auditory function, in concert with the highly mathematical nature of hearing's physical bases, provide an ideal scientific application for the newly emergent techniques pertaining to scientific visualization and auralization.

Further progress in hearing science requires the sort of computational techniques now being developed at various sites around the world (but concentrated, at present, in the United States and the United Kingdom) for modeling and visualization of complex auditory phenomena. The design of future-generation hearing prostheses, speech recognition systems and audio technologies all vitally depend on such methodology and the understanding resulting from its intelligent application.

The Advanced Study Institute (ASI) will bring together leading pioneers in the emerging field of computational hearing to present their perspectives on the application of computational methods to various domains of auditory research.

The ASI will survey the traditional domains of hearing research, including anatomy, physiology, psychoacoustics, speech and music, but from a largely computational perspective. Several topics, such as auditory scene analysis, speech recognition and auditory processing under adverse acoustic conditions are inherently computational in nature. Other subjects, such as the physiology of the auditory periphery, have witnessed a significant amount of computational effort over the past decade and a half. The goal is to provide a coherent and comprehensive perspective on hearing that is integrated with state-of-the-art computational modeling and visualization techniques that can serve as the basis for a new generation of auditory research.

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