Human and Machine Hearing
Extracting Meaning from Sound

This book describes how human hearing works and how to build machines that analyze sounds in the same way that people do.

Richard F. Lyon (Author)

9781107007536, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 May 2017

586 pages
26 x 18.5 x 3 cm, 1.38 kg

'This is a wonderfully written and much-needed book, written by a true world-class expert in the field. It is an ideal reference for students and professional researchers alike - authoritative and delightfully readable. It provides the best and most up-to-date coverage of auditory neuroscience and modeling there is.' Daniel J. Levitin, best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music

Human and Machine Hearing is the first book to comprehensively describe how human hearing works and how to build machines to analyze sounds in the same way that people do. Drawing on over thirty-five years of experience in analyzing hearing and building systems, Richard F. Lyon explains how we can now build machines with close-to-human abilities in speech, music, and other sound-understanding domains. He explains human hearing in terms of engineering concepts, and describes how to incorporate those concepts into machines for a wide range of modern applications. The details of this approach are presented at an accessible level, to bring a diverse range of readers, from neuroscience to engineering, to a common technical understanding. The description of hearing as signal-processing algorithms is supported by corresponding open-source code, for which the book serves as motivating documentation.

Part I. Sound Analysis and Representation Overview: 1. Introduction
2. Theories of hearing
3. On logarithmic and power-law hearing
4. Human hearing overview
5. Acoustic approaches and auditory influence
Part II. Systems Theory of Hearing: 6. Introduction to linear systems
7. Discrete-time and digital systems
8. Resonators
9. Gammatone and related filters
10. Nonlinear systems
11. Automatic gain control
12. Waves in distributed systems
Part III. The Auditory Periphery: 13. Auditory filter models
14. Modeling the cochlea
15. The CARFAC digital cochlear model
16. The cascade of asymmetric resonators
17. The outer hair cell
18. The inner hair cell
19. The AGC loop filter
Part IV. The Auditory Nervous System: 20. Auditory nerve and cochlear nucleus
21. The auditory image
22. Binaural spatial hearing
23. The auditory brain
Part V. Learning and Applications: 24. Neural networks for machine learning
25. Feature space
26. Sound search
27. Musical melody matching
28. Other applications.

Subject Areas: Audio processing [UYU], Signal processing [UYS], Machine learning [UYQM], Wave mechanics [vibration & acoustics PHDS]