Andrew Oxenham, Psychology
"Surveying the soundscape: Studies in auditory perception"
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     The auditory system has the daunting task of converting the chaotic mixture  of sounds waves that arrive at the ear into a meaningful representation of  the acoustic environment.  This talk will review some recent studies from  our lab that are aimed at elucidating how this is achieved, from analyzing  how different aspects of the acoustic waveforms are processed in the  peripheral auditory system, to identifying cortical neural correlates of  auditory awareness in complex auditory scenes.

Suggested readings:

• Carlyon, R.P. How the brain separates sounds. Trends Cogn Sci 8, 465-471 (2004)
• Oxenham, A.J., Bernstein, J.G.W. & Penagos, H. Correct tonotopic representation is necessary for complex pitch perception. Proc. Natl .Acad. Sci. USA 101, 1421-1425 (2004).
  
• Smith, Z.M., Delgutte, B. & Oxenham, A.J. Chimaeric sounds reveal dichotomies in auditory perception. Nature 416, 87-90 (2002).