Josh McDermott, Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, describes the early stages of human auditory processing and addresses how important information about the world can be derived from sound. Combining studies of auditory perception and computational modeling, Dr. McDermott shows how the brain may take advantage of regularities in how reverberation manifests itself in the complex signal that enters the ear, in order to distinguish multiple sound sources, often referred to as the Cocktail Party problem.

Video:

• Sound, ears, brains and the world (59:15)

Additional Resources:

• Josh McDermott’s website
• McDermott, J. H. (2009) The cocktail party problem, Current Biology 19(22): R1024–27.
• McDermott, J. H. (2013) Audition, In Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience Two Volume Set (Oxford Library of Psychology), edited by K. N. Ochsner and S. Kosslyn, Oxford University Press.
• Traer, J. & McDermott, J. H. (2016) Statistics of natural reverberation enable perceptual separation of sound and space, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(48):E7856 - E7865.
• Popham, S., Boebinger, D., Ellis, D. P. W., Kawahara, H. & McDermott, J. H.  (2018) Inharmonic speech reveals the role of harmonicity in the cocktail party problem, Nature Communications 9: 2122.