This grant will support a two-and-a-half-day long workshop on Computational Audition, bringing together top scientists from a broad range of disciplines. Computational audition, the study of how information can be derived from sound in both biological organisms and in machines, is an emerging field. The topic is broad, encompassing a diverse group of scientists including neuroscientists, psychologists, psychophysicists, speech scientists, computer scientists, and engineers. The field of computational audition has the potential to be a model of interdisciplinary research with a great deal of intrinsic intellectual interest. It is primed to become a hotbed of scientific growth, and this meeting will help the field evolve toward that goal.
Broader Impacts Computational audition is important both for developing new technological applications as well as for finding new clinical treatments (because understanding the basis of normal hearing will help treat hearing impairment). And yet by comparison to many other related fields, its potential is underexplored. For instance, research on human and machine perception has been dominated to a large extent by vision, with hearing neglected by comparison. This workshop will nurture the development of interdisciplinary research in computational audition that will capitalize on this potential.
