Complex Acoustic Signals Research Articles

Mismatch negativity in children with specific language impairment and auditory processing disorder

IntroductionMismatch negativity, an electrophysiological measure, evaluates the brain's capacity to discriminate sounds, regardless of attentional and behavioral capacity. Thus, this auditory event-related potential is promising in the study of the neurophysiological basis underlying auditory processing. ObjectiveTo investigate complex acoustic signals (speech) encoded in the auditory nervous system of children with specific language impairment and compare with children with auditory processing disorders and typical development through the mismatch negativity paradigm. MethodsIt was a prospective study. 75 children (6–12 years) participated in this study: 25 children with specific language impairment, 25 with auditory processing disorders, and 25 with typical development. Mismatch negativity was obtained by subtracting from the waves obtained by the stimuli /ga/ (frequent) and /da/ (rare). Measures of mismatch negativity latency and two amplitude measures were analyzed. ResultsIt was possible to verify an absence of mismatch negativity in 16% children with specific language impairment and 24% children with auditory processing disorders. In the comparative analysis, auditory processing disorders and specific language impairment showed higher latency values and lower amplitude values compared to typical development. ConclusionThese data demonstrate changes in the automatic discrimination of crucial acoustic components of speech sounds in children with specific language impairment and auditory processing disorders. It could indicate problems in physiological processes responsible for ensuring the discrimination of acoustic contrasts in pre-attentional and pre-conscious levels, contributing to poor perception.

Effect of echolocation behavior-related constant frequency-frequency modulation sound on the frequency tuning of inferior collicular neurons in Hipposideros armiger.

In constant frequency-frequency modulation (CF-FM) bats, the CF-FM echolocation signals include both CF and FM components, yet the role of such complex acoustic signals in frequency resolution by bats remains unknown. Using CF and CF-FM echolocation signals as acoustic stimuli, the responses of inferior collicular (IC) neurons of Hipposideros armiger were obtained by extracellular recordings. We tested the effect of preceding CF or CF-FM sounds on the shape of the frequency tuning curves (FTCs) of IC neurons. Results showed that both CF-FM and CF sounds reduced the number of FTCs with tailed lower-frequency-side of IC neurons. However, more IC neurons experienced such conversion after adding CF-FM sound compared with CF sound. We also found that the Q 20 value of the FTC of IC neurons experienced the largest increase with the addition of CF-FM sound. Moreover, only CF-FM sound could cause an increase in the slope of the neurons' FTCs, and such increase occurred mainly in the lower-frequency edge. These results suggested that CF-FM sound could increase the accuracy of frequency analysis of echo and cut-off low-frequency elements from the habitat of bats more than CF sound.

Distributed neural representations of phonological features during speech perception.

A fundamental goal of the human auditory system is to map complex acoustic signals onto stable internal representations of the basic sound patterns of speech. Phonemes and the distinctive features that they comprise constitute the basic building blocks from which higher-level linguistic representations, such as words and sentences, are formed. Although the neural structures underlying phonemic representations have been well studied, there is considerable debate regarding frontal-motor cortical contributions to speech as well as the extent of lateralization of phonological representations within auditory cortex. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and multivoxel pattern analysis to investigate the distributed patterns of activation that are associated with the categorical and perceptual similarity structure of 16 consonant exemplars in the English language used in Miller and Nicely's (1955) classic study of acoustic confusability. Participants performed an incidental task while listening to phonemes in the MRI scanner. Neural activity in bilateral anterior superior temporal gyrus and supratemporal plane was correlated with the first two components derived from a multidimensional scaling analysis of a behaviorally derived confusability matrix. We further showed that neural representations corresponding to the categorical features of voicing, manner of articulation, and place of articulation were widely distributed throughout bilateral primary, secondary, and association areas of the superior temporal cortex, but not motor cortex. Although classification of phonological features was generally bilateral, we found that multivariate pattern information was moderately stronger in the left compared with the right hemisphere for place but not for voicing or manner of articulation.

Sad and happy emotion discrimination in music by children with cochlear implants

Children using cochlear implants (CIs) develop speech perception but have difficulty perceiving complex acoustic signals. Mode and tempo are the two components used to recognize emotion in music. Based on CI limitations, we hypothesized children using CIs would have impaired perception of mode cues relative to their normal hearing peers and would rely more heavily on tempo cues to distinguish happy from sad music. Study participants were children with 13 right CIs and 3 left CIs (M = 12.7, SD = 2.6 years) and 16 normal hearing peers. Participants judged 96 brief piano excerpts from the classical genre as happy or sad in a forced-choice task. Music was randomly presented with alterations of transposed mode, tempo, or both. When music was presented in original form, children using CIs discriminated between happy and sad music with accuracy well above chance levels (87.5%) but significantly below those with normal hearing (98%). The CI group primarily used tempo cues, whereas normal hearing children relied more on mode cues. Transposing both mode and tempo cues in the same musical excerpt obliterated cues to emotion for both groups. Children using CIs showed significantly slower response times across all conditions. Children using CIs use tempo cues to discriminate happy versus sad music reflecting a very different hearing strategy than their normal hearing peers. Slower reaction times by children using CIs indicate that they found the task more difficult and support the possibility that they require different strategies to process emotion in music than normal.

Temporal coherence for complex signals in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and humans (Homo sapiens).

The auditory scene is filled with an array of overlapping acoustic signals, yet relatively little work has focused on how animals are able to perceptually isolate different sound sources necessary for survival. Much of the previous work on auditory scene analysis has investigated how sequential pure tone stimuli are perceived, but how temporally overlapping complex communication signals are segregated has been largely ignored. In this study, budgerigars and humans were tested using psychophysical procedures to measure their perception of synchronous, asynchronous, and partially overlapping complex signals, including bird calls and human vowels. Segregation thresholds for complex stimuli were significantly lower than those for pure tone stimuli in both humans and birds. Additionally, a species effect was discovered such that relative to humans, budgerigars required significantly less temporal separation between 2 sounds in order to segregate them. Overall, and similar to previous behavioral results investigating temporal coherence, the results from this experiment illustrate that temporal cues are particularly important for auditory scene analysis across multiple species and for both simple and complex acoustic signals.

Chapter 37 - Hearing and music in dementia

Music is a complex acoustic signal that relies on a number of different brain and cognitive processes to create the sensation of hearing. Changes in hearing function are generally not a major focus of concern for persons with a majority of neurodegenerative diseases associated with dementia, such as Alzheimer disease (AD). However, changes in the processing of sounds may be an early, and possibly preclinical, feature of AD and other neurodegenerative diseases. The aim of this chapter is to review the current state of knowledge concerning hearing and music perception in persons who have a dementia as a result of a neurodegenerative disease. The review focuses on both peripheral and central auditory processing in common neurodegenerative diseases, with a particular focus on the processing of music and other non-verbal sounds. The chapter also reviews music interventions used for persons with neurodegenerative diseases.

Chapter 5 - Temporal coding in the auditory cortex

Speech is a complex acoustic signal showing a quasiperiodic structure at several timescales. Integrated neural signals recorded in the cortex also show periodicity at different timescales. In this chapter we outline the neural mechanisms that potentially allow the auditory cortex to segment and encode continuous speech. This chapter focuses on how the human auditory cortex uses the temporal structure of the acoustic signal to extract phonemes and syllables, the two major constituents of connected speech. We argue that the quasiperiodic structure of collective neural activity in auditory cortex represents the ideal mechanical infrastructure to fractionate continuous speech into linguistic constituents of variable sizes.

Processing of simple and complex acoustic signals in a tonotopically organized ear.

Processing of complex signals in the hearing organ remains poorly understood. This paper aims to contribute to this topic by presenting investigations on the mechanical and neuronal response of the hearing organ of the tropical bushcricket species Mecopoda elongata to simple pure tone signals as well as to the conspecific song as a complex acoustic signal. The high-frequency hearing organ of bushcrickets, the crista acustica (CA), is tonotopically tuned to frequencies between about 4 and 70 kHz. Laser Doppler vibrometer measurements revealed a strong and dominant low-frequency-induced motion of the CA when stimulated with either pure tone or complex stimuli. Consequently, the high-frequency distal area of the CA is more strongly deflected by low-frequency-induced waves than by high-frequency-induced waves. This low-frequency dominance will have strong effects on the processing of complex signals. Therefore, we additionally studied the neuronal response of the CA to native and frequency-manipulated chirps. Again, we found a dominant influence of low-frequency components within the conspecific song, indicating that the mechanical vibration pattern highly determines the neuronal response of the sensory cells. Thus, we conclude that the encoding of communication signals is modulated by ear mechanics.

The importance of syntax in a dynamic visual signal: recognition of jacky dragon displays depends upon sequence

It is well established that recognition of complex acoustic signals, such as bird song, is dependent upon the temporal ordering of signal units or syntax. Much less is known about functionally analogous visual displays. The jacky dragon (Amphibolurus muricatus) is a native Australian agamid lizard with a highly stereotyped visual display made up of three discrete motor patterns. We conducted a playback experiment using high-resolution computer animations of conspecifics to test the importance of temporal order for signal efficacy. Lizards were shown three different life-sized simulated animations of conspecific differing in their skin texture and morphology signatures ranging from highly natural to abnormal. We evaluated signal recognition and assessed the relative importance of syntax and morphology. Our results showed that signal recognition is highly sensitive to syntax and this largely determines the observers’ behavioural responses. Stimuli with abnormal texture and shape were highly effective, as long as the natural order of motor patterns was preserved. Display recognition in jacky lizards hence depends upon syntax in just the same way as temporally constrained signals in other modalities.

The Evaluation of Vocal Pitch Accuracy

The objective analysis of Western operatic singing voices indicates that professional singers can be particularly “out of tune.” This study aims to better understand the evaluation of operatic voices, which have particularly complex acoustical signals. Twenty-two music experts were asked to evaluate the vocal pitch accuracy of 14 sung performances with a pairwise comparison paradigm, in a test and a retest. In addition to the objective measurement of pitch accuracy (pitch interval deviation), several performance parameters (average tempo, fundamental frequency of the starting note) and quality parameters (energy distribution, vibrato rate and extent) were observed and compared to the judges’ perceptual rating. The results show high intra and interjudge reliability when rating the pitch accuracy of operatic singing voices. Surprisingly, all the parameters were significantly related to the ratings and explain 78.8% of the variability of the judges’ rating. The pitch accuracy evaluation of operatic voices is thus not based exclusively on the precision of performed music intervals but on a complex combination of performance and quality parameters.

Systematic Error of Acoustic Particle Image Velocimetry and Its Correction

Abstract Particle Image Velocimetry is getting more and more often the method of choice not only for visualization of turbulent mass flows in fluid mechanics, but also in linear and non-linear acoustics for non-intrusive visualization of acoustic particle velocity. Particle Image Velocimetry with low sampling rate (about 15Hz) can be applied to visualize the acoustic field using the acquisition synchronized to the excitation signal. Such phase-locked PIV technique is described and used in experiments presented in the paper. The main goal of research was to propose a model of PIV systematic error due to non-zero time interval between acquisitions of two images of the examined sound field seeded with tracer particles, what affects the measurement of complex acoustic signals. Usefulness of the presented model is confirmed experimentally. The correction procedure, based on the proposed model, applied to measurement data increases the accuracy of acoustic particle velocity field visualization and creates new possibilities in observation of sound fields excited with multi-tonal or band-limited noise signals.

Music listening engages specific cortical regions within the temporal lobes: Differences between musicians and non-musicians

Music and speech are two of the most relevant and common sounds in the human environment. Perceiving and processing these two complex acoustical signals rely on a hierarchical functional network distributed throughout several brain regions within and beyond the auditory cortices. Given their similarities, the neural bases for processing these two complex sounds overlap to a certain degree, but particular brain regions may show selectivity for one or the other acoustic category, which we aimed to identify. We examined 53 subjects (28 of them professional musicians) by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), using a paradigm designed to identify regions showing increased activity in response to different types of musical stimuli, compared to different types of complex sounds, such as speech and non-linguistic vocalizations. We found a region in the anterior portion of the superior temporal gyrus (aSTG) (planum polare) that showed preferential activity in response to musical stimuli and was present in all our subjects, regardless of musical training, and invariant across different musical instruments (violin, piano or synthetic piano). Our data show that this cortical region is preferentially involved in processing musical, as compared to other complex sounds, suggesting a functional role as a second-order relay, possibly integrating acoustic characteristics intrinsic to music (e.g., melody extraction). Moreover, we assessed whether musical experience modulates the response of cortical regions involved in music processing and found evidence of functional differences between musicians and non-musicians during music listening. In particular, bilateral activation of the planum polare was more prevalent, but not exclusive, in musicians than non-musicians, and activation of the right posterior portion of the superior temporal gyrus (planum temporale) differed between groups. Our results provide evidence of functional specialization for music processing in specific regions of the auditory cortex and show domain-specific functional differences possibly correlated with musicianship.

Inhibition does not affect the timing code for vocalizations in the mouse auditory midbrain.

Many animals use a diverse repertoire of complex acoustic signals to convey different types of information to other animals. The information in each vocalization therefore must be coded by neurons in the auditory system. One way in which the auditory system may discriminate among different vocalizations is by having highly selective neurons, where only one or two different vocalizations evoke a strong response from a single neuron. Another strategy is to have specific spike timing patterns for particular vocalizations such that each neural response can be matched to a specific vocalization. Both of these strategies seem to occur in the auditory midbrain of mice. The neural mechanisms underlying rate and time coding are unclear, however, it is likely that inhibition plays a role. Here, we examined whether inhibition is involved in shaping neural selectivity to vocalizations via rate and/or time coding in the mouse inferior colliculus (IC). We examined extracellular single unit responses to vocalizations before and after iontophoretically blocking GABAA and glycine receptors in the IC of awake mice. We then applied a number of neurometrics to examine the rate and timing information of individual neurons. We initially evaluated the neuronal responses using inspection of the raster plots, spike-counting measures of response rate and stimulus preference, and a measure of maximum available stimulus-response mutual information. Subsequently, we used two different event sequence distance measures, one based on vector space embedding, and one derived from the Victor/Purpura Dq metric, to direct hierarchical clustering of responses. In general, we found that the most salient feature of pharmacologically blocking inhibitory receptors in the IC was the lack of major effects on the functional properties of IC neurons. Blocking inhibition did increase response rate to vocalizations, as expected. However, it did not significantly affect spike timing, or stimulus selectivity of the studied neurons. We observed two main effects when inhibition was locally blocked: (1) Highly selective neurons maintained their selectivity and the information about the stimuli did not change, but response rate increased slightly. (2) Neurons that responded to multiple vocalizations in the control condition, also responded to the same stimuli in the test condition, with similar timing and pattern, but with a greater number of spikes. For some neurons the information rate generally increased, but the information per spike decreased. In many of these neurons, vocalizations that generated no responses in the control condition generated some response in the test condition. Overall, we found that inhibition in the IC does not play a substantial role in creating the distinguishable and reliable neuronal temporal spike patterns in response to different vocalizations.

Encoding frequency contrast in primate auditory cortex

Changes in amplitude and frequency jointly determine much of the communicative significance of complex acoustic signals, including human speech. We have previously described responses of neurons in the core auditory cortex of awake rhesus macaques to sinusoidal amplitude modulation (SAM) signals. Here we report a complementary study of sinusoidal frequency modulation (SFM) in the same neurons. Responses to SFM were analogous to SAM responses in that changes in multiple parameters defining SFM stimuli (e.g., modulation frequency, modulation depth, carrier frequency) were robustly encoded in the temporal dynamics of the spike trains. For example, changes in the carrier frequency produced highly reproducible changes in shapes of the modulation period histogram, consistent with the notion that the instantaneous probability of discharge mirrors the moment-by-moment spectrum at low modulation rates. The upper limit for phase locking was similar across SAM and SFM within neurons, suggesting shared biophysical constraints on temporal processing. Using spike train classification methods, we found that neural thresholds for modulation depth discrimination are typically far lower than would be predicted from frequency tuning to static tones. This "dynamic hyperacuity" suggests a substantial central enhancement of the neural representation of frequency changes relative to the auditory periphery. Spike timing information was superior to average rate information when discriminating among SFM signals, and even when discriminating among static tones varying in frequency. This finding held even when differences in total spike count across stimuli were normalized, indicating both the primacy and generality of temporal response dynamics in cortical auditory processing.

Male hyraxes increase song complexity and duration in the presence of alert individuals

The goal of vocal communication is the efficient delivery of signals to a target audience. Long and complex vocalizations are especially challenging because they are subject to environmental interference and may incur significant costs for the signaler. One of the various ways of increasing the efficiency of signal delivery is enhancement of communicational efforts only when potential audience is perceived nearby in an attempt to maximize the benefit over the cost of signaling (audience effect). Another way is signaling subsequently to events that intensify individual alertness in order to ensure audience attentiveness and sensitivity to the transmitted information. Rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis) are social mammals that use complex acoustic signals to communicate. Adult male hyraxes produce elaborate vocalizations (known as songs) that serve as honest advertisements of their quality. By combining analysis of male hyrax songs recorded in the field over a period of 11 years and playback experiments, we found that songs performed during and following attention-grabbing events (agonistic interactions, alarm calls, predator presence, and songs performed as a reply to conspecific singing) have an increased structural and syntactic complexity in comparison to spontaneous singing. Male hyraxes demonstrate a cognitive ability to optimize their advertising efforts in response to multiple types of events. This signaling strategy exploits the effective communication window created by attention-grabbing events and by the presence of an alert audience to delivers structurally and syntactically enhanced signal. To our knowledge, this is the first report of syntactic complexity of vocal signaling being altered following various triggers that change conspecifics mental state in terrestrial mammals.

Effects of Core Auditory Cortex Deactivation on Neuronal Response to Simple and Complex Acoustic Signals in the Contralateral Anterior Auditory Field

Interhemispheric communication has been implicated in various functions of sensory signal processing and perception. Despite ample evidence demonstrating this phenomenon in the visual and somatosensory systems, to date, limited functional assessment of transcallosal transmission during periods of acoustic signal exposure has hindered our understanding of the role of interhemispheric connections between auditory cortical fields. Consequently, the present investigation examines the impact of core auditory cortical field deactivation on response properties of contralateral anterior auditory field (AAF) neurons in the felis catus. Single-unit responses to simple and complex acoustic signals were measured across AAF before, during, and after individual and combined cooling deactivation of contralateral primary auditory cortex (A1) and AAF neurons. Data analyses revealed that on average: 1) interhemispheric projections from core auditory areas to contralateral AAF neurons are predominantly excitatory, 2) changes in response strength vary based on acoustic features, 3) A1 and AAF projections can modulate AAF activity differently, 4) decreases in response strength are not specific to particular cortical laminae, and 5) contralateral inputs modulate AAF neuronal response thresholds. Collectively, these observations demonstrate that A1 and AAF neurons predominantly modulate AAF response properties via excitatory projections.

Acoustic surface perception from naturally occurring step sounds of a dexterous hexapod robot

Legged robots that exhibit dynamic dexterity naturally interact with the surface to generate complex acoustic signals carrying rich information on the surface as well as the robot platform itself. However, the nature of a legged robot, which is a complex, hybrid dynamic system, renders the more common approach of model-based system identification impractical. The present paper focuses on acoustic surface identification and proposes a non-model-based analysis and classification approach adopted from the speech processing literature. A novel feature set composed of spectral band energies augmented by their vector time derivatives and time-domain averaged zero crossing rate is proposed. Using a multi-dimensional vector classifier, these features carry enough information to accurately classify a range of commonly occurring indoor and outdoor surfaces without using of any mechanical system model. A comparative experimental study is carried out and classification performance and computational complexity are characterized. Different feature combinations, classifiers and changes in critical design parameters are investigated. A realistic and representative acoustic data set is collected with the robot moving at different speeds on a number of surfaces. The study demonstrates promising performance of this non-model-based approach, even in an acoustically uncontrolled environment. The approach also has good chance of performing in real-time.

Passive hearing stability in the bottlenose dolphin Tursiops truncatus to low frequency noise spectrum deformation

In behavioral experiments on bottle-nosed dolphins there was evaluated efficiency of identification of the low frequency noises that represent a certain rhythmical sequence of impulses, at destabilization of their spectra by method of frequency wobble. Results of the experiments have shown that disturbance of spectra structure at erosion of its discrete components does not lead to a decrease of efficiency of the noise identification, which indicates the greater significance of the time, rather than spectral mechanisms at processing of the complex acoustic signals by the dolphin auditory system.

Functional changes between seasons in the male songbird auditory forebrain

Songbirds are an excellent model for investigating the perception of learned complex acoustic communication signals. Male European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) sing throughout the year distinct types of song that bear either social or individual information. Although the relative importance of social and individual information changes seasonally, evidence of functional seasonal changes in neural response to these songs remains elusive. We thus decided to use in vivo functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine auditory responses of male starlings that were exposed to songs that convey different levels of information (species-specific and group identity or individual identity), both during (when mate recognition is particularly important) and outside the breeding season (when group recognition is particularly important). We report three main findings: (1) the auditory area caudomedial nidopallium (NCM), an auditory region that is analogous to the mammalian auditory cortex, is clearly involved in the processing/categorization of conspecific songs; (2) season-related change in differential song processing is limited to a caudal part of NCM; in the more rostral parts, songs bearing individual information induce higher BOLD responses than songs bearing species and group information, regardless of the season; (3) the differentiation between songs bearing species and group information and songs bearing individual information seems to be biased toward the right hemisphere. This study provides evidence that auditory processing of behaviorally-relevant (conspecific) communication signals changes seasonally, even when the spectro-temporal properties of these signals do not change.

Cochlea-scaled entropy predicts intelligibility of Mandarin Chinese sentences

Cochlea-scaled spectral entropy (CSE; Stilp & Kluender, PNAS, 107(27):12387-12392 [2010]) is a measure of information-bearing change in complex acoustic signals such as speech. CSE robustly predicts English sentence intelligibility even amidst temporal distortion and widely different speaking rates (Stilp, Kiefte, Alexander, & Kluender, JASA, 128(4):2112-2126). However, CSE does not explicitly capture changes in fundamental frequency (f0) in any way distinct from that for other aspects of spectral shape (e.g., formant patterns, slope). This property of CSE could limit its ability to predict intelligibility of tone languages that use f0 for phonetic and morphological distinctions. The present study assesses the predictive power of CSE for Mandarin Chinese sentence intelligibility. Twenty-five native-Mandarin listeners transcribed Mandarin sentences in which consonant-length (80-ms) and vowel-length (112-ms) segments with either high or low CSE were replaced with speech-shaped noise. CSE reliably predicted listener performance; as greater amounts of CSE were replaced by noise, performance worsened. Results encourage information-theoretic approaches to speech perception, as change and not physical acoustic measures best predict sentence intelligibility across tonal and nontonal languages. [Work supported by NIDCD.]