Seminars in Hearing Research

Date: Thursday, February 19, 2026

Location: Zoom   https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/4326340458 Meeting ID: 432 634 0458

Time: 12:00-1:00pm

Speaker:Dr. Jarrod Hicks.  Post Doctorial Associate, University of Rochester

Title:  The role of texture in auditory scene analysis.

Abstract:Everyday auditory scenes contain sounds from many sources. For example, when crossing the street, you might hear sounds produced from the rumble of passing cars, the chatter of pedestrians, and the rapid tick of crosswalk signals. To make sense of this complex mixture, the auditory system must separate the sounds into coherent perceptual representations that correspond to the underlying sources in the world. This process is known as auditory scene analysis. While decades of work on auditory scene analysis have revealed important principles of perceptual organization, much of this work was conducted using relatively simple synthetic stimuli, leaving open the extent to which these principles apply to real-world scenes with natural sounds. In this talk, I present two studies examining auditory scene analysis with a common class of natural environmental sounds known as textures. The first study investigates hearing in noise using real-world background "noise" textures and shows that the auditory system uses internal models of noise properties to facilitate the estimation of other concurrent sounds. The second study examines the perceptual separation of multiple texture sources and the higher-order statistical representations that define natural textures. Together, the results reveal new aspects of auditory scene analysis with real world sounds and clarify the role texture plays in everyday hearing. .

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The working schedule is available here: https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_schedule

The titles and abstracts of the talks will be added here: https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_abstracts