On Tuesday, 21st of June 2016, Leslie Smith from the University of Stirling will give an IGSN Colloquium talk about "Using spikes to code sound" in the FNO building  01/117 (the IGSN seminar room). Host is Rolf Würtz. INI members are welcome to attend.

For background about the speaker: http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~lss/

Abstract of talk: Much of the sound interpretation world uses Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) for coding sound for interpretation. While such coding is highly compressed, it loses all information about the fine time-structure of the sound, and this is particularly important both for locating sound sources and for separating foreground sound from the background. We describe a simple spike (event) based coding technique that maintains fine time structure, and report on how we have used it for sound direction finding, for segmenting sounds, and for determining the type of musical instrument that generated a sound. We discuss why this type of representation can be useful for sound interpretation in realistic environments, and discuss possible ways forward for this type of approach.