Natural and Machine Hearing

Auditory neuroscience. Animals and humans' hearing starts by transforming sound into electrical signals in the ear, and processing them in a network of billions of neurons in the brain. We study this by developing theoretical frameworks and state-of-the-art experimental approaches.

Synthetic hearing. Can devices achieve hearing acuity as good as humans, or even super-human capability?

One in six people suffers from hearing impairment. These lead to professional and social problems understanding speech. We are working to better understand the causes and forms of hearing impairments, on better diagnostic methods, and on new treatments through prosthetics and other hearing devices.

Sound production: from the design and evaluation of auditory displays, to the creation of acoustic virtual and augmented reality applications and devices.

Sound perception. How do humans and animals hear and make sense of sounds?

Acoustics. 3D sound mapping, microphone arrays, hearing aids, robotics.

Speech is the most natural form of communication for human-machine interaction. Research topics addressed include speech dereverberation, noise reduction, speech analysis and speech modelling.