Modeling Pitch Perception With an Active Auditory Model Extended by Octopus Cells

Pitch is an essential category for musical sensations. Models of pitch perception are vividly discussed up to date. Most of them rely on definitions of mathematical methods in the spectral or temporal domain. Our proposed pitch perception model is composed of an active auditory model extended by octopus cells. The active auditory model is the same as used in the Stimulation based on Auditory Modeling (SAM), a successful cochlear implant sound processing strategy extended here by modeling the functional behavior of the octopus cells in the ventral cochlear nucleus and by modeling their connections to the auditory nerve fibers (ANFs). The neurophysiological parameterization of the extended model is fully described in the time domain. The model is based on latency-phase en- and decoding as octopus cells are latency-phase rectifiers in their local receptive fields. Pitch is ubiquitously represented by cascaded firing sweeps of octopus cells. Based on the firing patterns of octopus cells, inter-spike interval histograms can be aggregated, in which the place of the global maximum is assumed to encode the pitch

A computational study of auditory models in music recognition tasks for normalhearing and hearing-impaired listeners

The utility of auditory models for solving three music recognition tasks { onset detection, pitch estimation and instrument recognition { is analyzed. Appropriate features are introduced which enable the use of supervised classification. The auditory model-based approaches are tested in a comprehensive study and compared to state-of-the-art methods, which usually do not employ an auditory model. For this study, music data is selected according to an experimental design, which enables statements about performance differences with respect to specific music characteristics. The results confirm that the performance of music classification using the auditory model is at least comparable to the traditional methods. Furthermore, the auditory model is modified to exemplify the decrease of recognition rates in the presence of hearing deficits. The resulting system is a basis for estimating the intelligibility of music which in the future might be used for the automatic assessment of hearing instruments