Malcolm Slaney



Publications and Pointers

Several of my technical reports and papers are available on the net for downloading. The following is a brief list.

Auditory Modeling

Interval Publications

"Pattern Playback in the '90s" is a paper that describes our scheme to take several auditory representations and turn them back into sound. This invited paper was presented at the 1994 NIPS conference and includes better spectrogram inversion techniques, a description of how to invert Lyon's passive cochlear model, and a description of correlogram inversion. A slightly earlier version of this paper was part of the Proceedings of the ATR Workshop on "A Biological Framework for Speech Perception and Production" published in September 1994.

A review I wrote of Pattern Playback techniques is an invited paper at the 1995 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. My paper is titled "Pattern Playback from 1950 to 1995" and a postscript version is available.

Most auditory models have been exclusively bottom-up, yet there is increasing evidence that a great deluge of information is flowing down from the cortex. A paper I wrote for the 1995 Computational Auditory Scene Analysis workshop is called "A Critique of Pure Audition" and is available as a Postscript file.

Apple Publications

The following are publications during my time at Apple. Those that are Apple Technical Reports can also be obtained by sending a postal address to corp.lib@applelink.apple.com. The Mathematica notebooks are designed to be self-documenting. Those that are Matlab toolboxes include separate documentation in Frame format.

"Auditory Model Inversion for Sound Separation" is the first paper to describe correlogram inversion techniques. We also discuss improved methods for inverting spectrograms and a cochlear model designed by Richard F. Lyon. A compressed postscript file is available from the Apple FTP archives.

"Lyon's Cochlear Model" is a Mathematica notebook that describes an implementation of simple (but efficient) cochlear model designed by Richard F. Lyon. It is also knows as Apple Technical Report #13.

A software package called MacEar implements the latest version of Lyon's Cochlear Model. MacEar is written in very portable C for Unix and Macintosh computers. This link points to the last published version (2.2).

Gammatone Math is a Mathematica notebook that describes a new more efficient implementation of the Gammatone filters that are often used to implement critical band models. It is also available as Apple Technical Report #35.

Filter Design is a Mathematica notebook that describes (and implements) many IIR filter design techniques.

An Auditory Toolbox contains Matlab functions to implement many different kinds of auditory models. The toolbox includes code for Lyon's passive longwave model, Patterson's gammatone filterbank, Meddis' hair cell model, Seneff's auditory model, the speech-recognition world's MFCC, and conventional spectrogram processing. Both Macintosh and Unix versions of the toolbox are available. This toolbox is published as Apple Computer Technical Report #45.

The SoundAndImage toolbox is a collection of Matlab tools to make it easier to work with sounds and images. On the Macintosh, tools are provided to record and playback sounds through the sound system, and to copy images to and from the scrapbook. For both Macintosh and Unix< system, routines are provided to read and write many common sound formats (including AIFF). This toolbox is published as Apple Computer Technical Report #61.


Other Research Pointers

I organize the Stanford CCRMA Hearing Seminar. Just about any topic related to auditory perception is considered fair game at the seminar. An archive of seminar announcements can be found at UCSC. Send email to hearing-seminar-request@ccrma.stanford.edu if you would like to be added to the mailing list.

In a past life, I worked on medical imaging. A book on tomographic imaging (cross-sectional x-ray imaging) was published by IEEE Press: Avinash C. Kak and Malcolm Slaney, Principles of Computerized Tomographic Imaging, (New York : IEEE Press, c1988). The software used to generate many of the tomographic images in this book is available.

Code to implement the diffraction tomography algorithms in my PhD Thesis is also available.

Carl Crawford, Mani Azimi and I wrote a simple Unix plotting package called qplot. Both simple planar and 3d surface plots are supported.

Now obsolete code to implement a DITroff previewer under SunView is available. This program was called suntroff and is an ancestor of the X WIndow System Troff previewer. The source, the LaserWriter fonts, and the complete package are all available separately.


For more Information

I can be reached at
Malcolm Slaney
Interval Research, Inc.
1801-C Page Mill Road
Palo Alto, CA 94304
(415) 842-6143
(415) 354-0872 (FAX)
The best way to reach me is to send email.
Malcolm Slaney (malcolm@interval.com)