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Welcome to the Auditory Lab at CMU!
Director: Laurie M. Heller, Ph.D.
Our research examines the human ability to use sound to understand events happening in the environment. Our perceptual experiments discover acoustic cues that reveal attributes of sound events, and how our knowledge of these cue-attribute relationships influences our recognition of sounds. We have also examined how this knowledge influences which brain regions are recruited during the perception of sound events. Our multimodal experiments have combined hearing and vision as well as asking whether sound affects the gestures we make. Our research on sound localization included teaching naive listeners to learn to extract information from echoes about the surrounding environment. Ongoing work involves the perception of sound categories and the effects of unwanted sounds. Collaborative applications are being developed to test sound recognition in hearing-impaired listeners and to improve the performance of a machine learning system for sound event classification. Applications of this research have the potential to enhance auditory displays, hearing aids, and navigation aids for the visually impaired.
Ecological Perspectives on Hearing, 2025 special issue in JASA and JASA-EL.
OPEN CALL. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
Statistics of natural auditory scenes
Detection, discrimination and identification of natural sounds
Principles of auditory scene analysis applied to natural environments
Causal perception of natural sounds
Neural correlates of natural sound perception
Effects of hearing loss and rehabilitation devices on natural sound perception
Biodiversity assessment via ecoacoustic approaches
Habitat assessment via ecoacoustic approaches
Population, community, landscape and conservation ecology
Restorative effects of natural sounds
Auditory perception of wilderness
Dr. Heller is Liason guest editor of this special issue. Call for papers open until Sept 30, 2025.
2024 Science News Explores article on noise (with quotes from Prof Heller).
2024 CyLab news article on deepfake detection (with quotes from Prof Heller).
2024 Sound Scene Synthesis Challenge:
Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE). April-July 2024
Prof Heller co-organized this challenge which perceptually evaluates sounds generated by text-to-audio machine learning models.
CONTACT US
Email: auditory@andrew.cmu.edu
Phone: (412) 268-8669
Laurie Heller's Faculty page, CMU Psychology
Interested in participating in paid research experiments?
Interested in conducting research?
Click here for a list of current opportunities!
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