Doctoral Training
I obtained my doctorate at the the
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) -- Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology Program (SHBT), with a concentration in Signal and System Analysis.
SHBT is a tight-knit research community dedicated to multidisciplinary training in basic, clinical and applied approaches to the study of all aspects of human communication and the treatment of its disorders. I have taken a number of
courses through the
SHBT program.
Doctoral Dissertation
My doctoral dissertation focused on understanding how people utilize auditory spatial cues to segregate sounds in cacophonous environments (also known as the "Cocktail Party Problem").
Thesis committee:
Past collaborators:
Dissertation title and abstract:
The Influence of Spatial Cues on the Identification and the Localization of Objects in the Auditory Foreground
The ability to form auditory objects is important in the natural environment where sounds arriving at our ears are a resultant of all spectro-temporal components that may have arisen from different auditory events. It has been shown that auditory spatial cues are effective for grouping acoustical energy across time or across frequency. However, little is known about the effect of spatial cues on scene analysis when more than one auditory object is being presented. In this thesis dissertation, a novel two-object paradigm will be used to investigate how spatial cues influence the identification and the localization of object in the auditory foreground. Specifically, by analyzing data from psychoacoustic experiments using signal detection theory, we will ascertain the effect of both spatial and non-spatial cues on auditory grouping and object identification. Using an acoustic pointer and the same stimuli for the object identification task, we will measure the apparent spatial location of these objects to test the hypothesis that only the spatial attributes of the components grouped to form an object influences the localization of the same object. We will generate a conceptual model to highlight the role of spatial cues in object formation, and further investigate whether there is dissociation between the auditory computation of “what” a source is and “where” it is located. We will also extend this novel two-object paradigm to investigate the role of attention in the build-up effect of auditory scene analysis. In current technology, object segregation presents a fundamental challenge for the hearing impaired, hearing aid design and speech recognition algorithms. It is hopeful that the findings in this dissertation will inspire new biologically-based algorithms for auditory scene analysis and in turn, influence designs in assistive hearing devices and other technological development that is dependent on multi-source segregation.
