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Banbury Center Workshop Series

Neurocomputational Strategies: From Synapses to Behavior (1998)
Functional Organization of the Thalamus and Cortex and their Interactions (1999)
Toward Animal Models of Attention and Consciousness (2000)
Persistent Neural Activity (2000)
Can a Machine Be Conscious? (2001)
Communication in Brain Systems (2004)
Neurobiology of Decision-Making (2005)
Computational Approaches to Cortical Functions (2006)
New Frontiers in Studies of Nonconscious Processing (2007)
Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Auditory and Visual Attention (2008)
Searching for Principles Underlying Memory in Biological Systems (2009)
Neuronal Response Variability and Cortical Computation (2011)
Connections and Communication in the Brain (2014)

Mark Kvale

Statistical properties of natural acoustic environments

University of California, San Francisco

Traditionally we have characterized the auditory response of animals by subjecting them to simple, isolated stimuli such as pure tones or white noise in a sound isolation booth. In the real world, animals and humans are subjected to a continuous barrage of complex sounds generated from many different sources. These sounds usually occur simultaneously over a wide range of intensities. In this talk, I will explore the statistical properties of a number of different natural acoustic environments. Linear recordings with a minimum of processing have been made in both natural and manmade environs. Amplitude, spectrotemporal and scaling properties of the sounds will be discussed and we will contrast these properties with those of natural images.