Complex Pitch Perception in Complex Environments

描述（由申请人提供）：本项目的长期目标是 进一步了解听觉系统如何形成音高感知， 这些感知是如何用来区分来自不同来源的声音的。 该项目有三个主要目标。第一个目标是使用以下组合： 心理物理实验和定量建模来研究音高如何 在正常人和受损人的听觉系统中都有编码实验将 调查听力正常者和耳蜗性聋者的听力 (HI)听众听到，或解决，个别谐波成分内， 复杂，并将其与音高编码的整体准确性和独立 测量频率选择性。据推测，沥青产生 由解析谐波产生的谐波与由 未解决的谐波单独和HI听众与较差的频率 选择性可能常常不得不依赖于后一种不太精确的音高形式 编码第二个目的是用类似的方法来测试音高的极限 在更复杂的情况下进行感知。这些实验将测试NH和HI 听众能够同时听到两个音高， 存在竞争性的汉诺音。这些能力可能依赖于 至少存在一些解析的谐波;如果是这样，HI听众可能经常 不能在一个位置上听到两个音高，或者在存在的情况下听到一个音高。 另第三个目的是分别评估包络线和 精细结构编码（两者都被认为是重要的， 在音高感知中的不同角色）， 不同的声源。这种方法更适用于并试图 量化在复杂背景中传输语音所需的信息， 例如竞争的谈话者或波动的噪声。结果可能会 这对耳蜗植入处理器的设计和 助听器的信号处理算法

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term goal of this project is to further our understanding of how the auditory system forms pitch percepts and how those percepts are used to separate sounds coming from different sources. The project has three main aims. The first aim is to use a combination of psychophysical experiments and quantitative modeling to investigate how pitch is coded in the normal and impaired human auditory system. Experiments will investigate the ability of normal-hearing (NH) and cochlearly hearing-impaired (HI) listeners to hear out, or resolve, individual harmonic components within a complex, and relate this to overall accuracy in pitch coding and to independent measures of frequency selectivity. It is hypothesized that the pitch produced by resolved harmonics is qualitatively different from that produced by unresolved harmonics alone and that HI listeners with poorer frequency selectivity may often have to rely on the latter, less accurate, form of pitch coding. The second aim is to use similar methods to test the limits of pitch perception in more complex situations. These experiments will test NH and HI listeners' ability to hear two pitches at once and to hear out one pitch in the presence of a competing hannonic sound. It may be that these abilities rely on the presence of at least some resolved harmonics; if so, HI listeners may often not be in a position to hear two pitches, or to hear out one in the presence of another. The third aim is to evaluate separately the influence of envelope and fine-structure coding (both of which are thought to play important but different roles in pitch perception) in our ability to perceptually separate different acoustic sources. This approach is more applied and attempts to quantify the information necessary to transmit speech in complex backgrounds, such as a competing talker or a fluctuating noise. The results may have significant implications for the design of cochlear-implant processors and for signal-processing algorithms for hearing aids.