Hearing | EPFL Graph Search

Hearing, or auditory perception, is the ability to perceive sounds through an organ, such as an ear, by detecting vibrations as periodic changes in the pressure of a surrounding medium. The academic field concerned with hearing is auditory science. Sound may be heard through solid, liquid, or gaseous matter. It is one of the traditional five senses. Partial or total inability to hear is called hearing loss. In humans and other vertebrates, hearing is performed primarily by the auditory system: mechanical waves, known as vibrations, are detected by the ear and transduced into nerve impulses that are perceived by the brain (primarily in the temporal lobe). Like touch, audition requires sensitivity to the movement of molecules in the world outside the organism. Both hearing and touch are types of mechanosensation. There are three main components of the human auditory system: the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. Outer ear The outer ear includes the pinna, the visible part of the ear, as well as the ear canal, which terminates at the eardrum, also called the tympanic membrane. The pinna serves to focus sound waves through the ear canal toward the eardrum. Because of the asymmetrical character of the outer ear of most mammals, sound is filtered differently on its way into the ear depending on the location of its origin. This gives these animals the ability to localize sound vertically. The eardrum is an airtight membrane, and when sound waves arrive there, they cause it to vibrate following the waveform of the sound. Cerumen (ear wax) is produced by ceruminous and sebaceous glands in the skin of the human ear canal, protecting the ear canal and tympanic membrane from physical damage and microbial invasion. Middle ear The middle ear consists of a small air-filled chamber that is located medial to the eardrum. Within this chamber are the three smallest bones in the body, known collectively as the ossicles which include the malleus, incus, and stapes (also known as the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, respectively).

Investigation of electrical stimulation of the optic nerve for artificial vision

Vivien Gaillet

Thanks to recent technological advances in microelectronics and bioengineering, it is now possible to restore lost or impaired sensory modalities by interfering the nervous system with elec-tronic devices and artificially reproducing the electrical encoding of the neural signals of the missing or defective sensory organs or tissues, as evidenced by the successful development of cochlear im-plants allow the restoration of hearing in deaf patients. This makes the treatment of blindness, a very impairing condition that significantly decreases the quality of life of the person it affects, a plausible possibility today, and many groups are currently attempting to apply the same principle of cochlear implants to sight restoration. So far, the preferred approach has been retinal implants due to their proximity to the defective cells, the photoreceptors, which minimizes the amount of processing of the neural signal that needs to be reproduced, and due to the reasonable number of stimulating sites that the retina can accommodate. Several devices have already demonstrated the possibility of restor-ing some degree of functional vision, albeit still very rudimentary. However, unlike hearing, vision is an extremely complex sensory modality, involving several cell types forming elaborate circuitry, which makes the advantages of retinal implants less definitive, and other alternative approaches such as op-tic nerve of cortical prosthesis still worth exploring. We believe the optic nerve stimulation is an at-tractive approach for several reasons; firstly, it does not require optical transparency. Secondly, it can address specific conditions such as severe eye trauma or retinal detachment where retinal implants cannot be employed. Finally, thanks to the organization of the optic nerve axonal fibers, it may likely result in the activation of axons originating from the same region of the visual field. This is not the case with epiretinal implants, which have been reported to stimulate undesired axons of passage in addition to the somas of their cellular targets, resulting in curved and elongated phosphenes that lim-it the implant's achievable resolution. In this thesis, we introduce a novel intraneural electrode design, the OpticSELINE, which aims at im-proving the selectivity and stability of the extra-neural cuff-electrodes previously used in optic nerve stimulation. We first characterized the device's improved mechanical and electrical properties and then proceeded to evaluate its stimulation capacity in vivo in the rabbit. In parallel to demonstrating the ability to modulate the magnitude of the cortical activation through the increase or decrease of the stimulation current, we implemented a hybrid finite element computational model to estimate the dimensions of the nerve portions activated by our electrical stimulation protocols. Using inde-pendent component analysis (ICA), we also developed a workflow that allows isolating components of the signal selectively related to a single or a pair of stimulating electrodes. We then focused on the development of new and improved algorithms to analyze the cortical activation patterns. We first developed a support machine vector (SVM)-based classifier that allowed us to accurately identify both the visual stimulus or the stimulating electrode that elicited a given cortical activation pattern amongst ten and eight total potential stimuli. Finally, we developed a regression model that also al-lowed us to accurat

EPFL2021

Pyramic array: An FPGA based platform for multi-channel audio acquisition

Juan Azcarreta Ortiz

Microphone arrays techniques present compelling applications for robotic applications. Those techniques can allow robots to listen to their environment and infer clues from it. Such features might enable capabilities such as natural interaction with humans, interpreting spoken commands or the localization of victims during search and rescue tasks. However, under noisy conditions robotic implementations of microphone arrays might degrade their precision when localizing sound sources. For practical applications, human hearing still leaves behind microphone arrays. Daniel Kisch is an example of how humans are able to efficiently perform echo-localization to recognize their environment, even in noisy and reverberant environments. For ubiquitous computing, another limitation of acoustic localization algorithms is within their capabilities of performing real-time Digital Signal Processing (DSP) operations. To tackle those problems, tradeoffs between size, weight, cost and power consumption compromise the design of acoustic sensors for practical applications. This works presents the design and operation of a large microphone array for DSP applications in realistic environments. To address those problems this project introduces the Pyramic sound capture system designed at LAP in EPFL. Pyramic is a custom hardware which possesses 48 microphones distributed in the edges of a tetrahedron. The microphone arrays interact with a Terasic DE1-SoC board from Altera Cyclone V family devices, which combines a Hard Processor System (HPS) and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) in the same die. The HPS part integrates a dual-core ARM-based Cortex-A9 processor, which combined with the power of FPGA design suitable for processing multichannel microphone signals. This thesis explains the implementation of the Pyramic array. Moreover, FPGA-based hardware accelerators have been designed to implement a Master SPI communication with the array and a parallel 48 channels FIR filters cascade of the audio data for delay-and-sum beamforming applications. Additionally, the configuration of the HPS part allows the Pyramic array to be controlled through a Linux based OS. The main purpose of the project is to develop a flexible platform in which real-time echo-location algorithms can be implemented. The effectiveness of the Pyramic array design is illustrated by testing the recorded data with offline direction of arrival algorithms developed at LCAV in EPFL.

2016

Perceptual Coding of High-Quality Digital Audio

Christof Faller, Karlheinz Brandenburg

This paper introduces high-quality audio coding using psychoacoustic models. This technology is now abundant, with gadgets named after a standard (mp3 players) and the ability to play high-quality audio from literally billions of devices. The usual paradigm for these systems is based on filterbanks, followed by quantization and coding, controlled by a model of human hearing. The paper describes the basic technology, theoretical framework to apply to check for optimality, and the most prominent standards built on the basic ideas and newer work.

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2013