IJCNN 2015: Special Session: Sound and speech interpretation in real environments

Scope and Motivation

Sounds in real environments arise from many concurrent sound sources, with reverberation induced smearing changing their spectrotemporal content. Eventually, sound (including speech) arrives at the ear or at the microphone as a time-varying signal, with the components of interest being between about 20 and 15,000 Hz. This is, of course, a mix of all the sound sources, all smeared by multiple reflections. How this signal should be processed to provide input to an interpreting system (which presumably would prefer to interpret only the signal of interest) is very much a matter of debate, particularly between those who use traditional MFCC techniques, and those who prefer something more neurally inspired, like a set of spike trains, and perhaps feature detectors as well. How should the sounds from a particular source of interest be segregated? How should interpretation be made invariant under listening conditions? Whatever techniques are used, the result is a time series of some type, and there are many neural techniques of possible interest for different aspects of this problem, from deep neural networks to learning-based spiking neural systems.

This session builds on the IJCNN Special Session in 2011, organised by the late Harry Erwin.

Topics

• Sound preprocessing for interpretation: creating suitable spectrotemporal representations for interpretation.
• Making spectrotemporal representations invariant under listening conditions;
• Interpretation techniques: what type of network might be used: e.g. purely trained, or using self-organisation as well. Can the network help with listening condition invariance?
• Implementation techniques: how to aim for real-time sound and speech interpretation for computer and robotic systems: hardware and hardware/software approaches.
• Auditory scene analysis using neural networks: separating out streams of sound in multi-source reverberant environments.

Dates and submission

Important Dates

Paper Submission