A perceptual space that can explain the robustness of...

Google Tech Talks May 25, 2007 ABSTRACT The sounds that animals use to communicate, including the syllables of speech, have a very special `pulse resonance' form which automatically distinguishes them from background noise. The parts of the body used to produce these sounds grow as the animal grows. Thus, there is `acoustic scale' variability in communication sounds which poses a serious problem for the perception and recognition stages of communication. The success of bio-acoustic communication suggests that the auditory system has a special pre-processor that automatically normalizes for acoustic scale as it constructs our internal `auditory image' of a sound. In this paper, we propose that the...