Event Abstract Back to Event Auditory contours and Gestalt rules for sound analysis Yoonseob Lim1*, Barbara Shinn-Cunningham1 and Timothy Gardner1 1 Boston University, United States Biological auditory systems have evolved to extract meaningful signals in complex acoustic environments, where engineering solutions often fail. The principles underlying this performance are not known, but it is hoped that a closer examination of neural auditory systems could inspire new paradigms. One distinguishing feature of the biological solution is the existence of parallel processing pathways from the cochlea to the cortex. Theories are needed to explain how this diverse set of channels could be optimally combined at higher levels of processing. Here we define a method for sound analysis that builds an efficient high-level representation from parallel early streams. In the proposed method, redundant pathways represent the sound in a range of time-scales. Through these streams, the sound waveform is converted into over-complete set of auditory contours---smooth curves in the time-frequency plane. From this collection of contours, Gestalt principles that apply to human visual and auditory perception guide the selection of the simplest, most compact representation for a given sound. As a result of this analysis, components of complex sounds are portrayed as coherent shapes, extending over long ranges in time and frequency, allowing for a variety of new forms of sound transformation and identification. Figure 1 Keywords: computational neuroscience, Genomics and genetics Conference: 4th INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics, Boston, United States, 4 Sep - 6 Sep, 2011. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Computational neuroscience Citation: Lim Y, Shinn-Cunningham B and Gardner T (2011). Auditory contours and Gestalt rules for sound analysis. Front. Neuroinform. Conference Abstract: 4th INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics. doi: 10.3389/conf.fninf.2011.08.00146 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 17 Oct 2011; Published Online: 19 Oct 2011. * Correspondence: Dr. Yoonseob Lim, Boston University, Boston, United States, yslim@bu.edu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Yoonseob Lim Barbara Shinn-Cunningham Timothy Gardner Google Yoonseob Lim Barbara Shinn-Cunningham Timothy Gardner Google Scholar Yoonseob Lim Barbara Shinn-Cunningham Timothy Gardner PubMed Yoonseob Lim Barbara Shinn-Cunningham Timothy Gardner Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.