The Perception and Cognition of Sound Texture

我们生活的环境充满了噪音。噪音使人们更难听到语音和其他感兴趣的声音，但也传达了关于我们周围世界的信息，告诉我们雨下得有多大，我们旁边的房间是否挤满了人，或者水壶可能离沸腾有多近。人类不仅擅长将其他声音与背景噪音区分开来，而且还擅长识别世界上噪音的原因。了解这些能力可以使助听器、人工耳蜗和基于语音的机器系统(如我们手机中的系统)变得更有效。在这里，研究人员建议研究人类在嘈杂环境中的听力。这项拟议的工作将共同追求三个目标。首先，研究人员将开发一个计算框架，以了解人类感知背后的噪音属性。这将涉及收集环境噪声的大量数据集，并测量它们的统计特性。然后，这些属性将通过合成具有相同属性的声音并询问它们是否真实和人类可识别来与人类的感知相关。其次，研究人员将测量人类听者感知地将噪音与其他声音区分开来的能力。然后，他们将建立能够预测这种分离成功或失败的条件的模型。第三，研究人员将测量人类听者记住不同声音的能力，并开发一个模型来解释为什么某些声音比其他声音更容易记住。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The environments in which we live are filled with noise. Noise makes speech and other sounds of interest harder to hear, but also conveys information about the world around us, telling us how hard it is raining, whether the room next to us is full of people, or how close a kettle may be to boiling. Humans excel both at separating other sounds from background noise and at recognizing the causes of the noise in the world. Understanding these abilities could enable more effective hearing aids, cochlear implants, and speech-based machine systems such as those in our phones. Here the investigators propose to study human abilities to hear in noisy conditions.The proposed work will jointly pursue three goals. First, the investigators will develop a computational framework to understand the properties of noise that underlie human perception. This will involve assembling a large data set of environmental noises and measuring their statistical properties. These properties will then be related to human perception by synthesizing sounds that have the same properties and asking whether they are realistic and recognizable to humans. Second, the investigators will measure the ability of human listeners to perceptually separate noise from other sounds. They will then build models that can predict the conditions in which such separation should succeed or fail. Third, the investigators will measure the ability of human listeners to remember different noises and develop a model to explain why some sounds are better remembered than others.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.