Hearing: Humans and Machines

Abstract:

Human hearing represents an important communication channel, used among other things for speech communication. Hearing impairments could severely limit human abilities to function in a society and significant efforts are spent to provide for compensation of some of the hearing impairments. Similar parallel efforts aim at machines that would emulate and exceed human capabilities in information extraction from speech. The talk attempts to show similarities between these two scientific and engineering fields and points to their gradual convergence. It argues for closer collaborations between hearing psychophysics and physiology, advanced hearing prosthetics and machine coding and recognition of speech.

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