Shihab Shamma

Title: The auditory cortex: A sensorimotor fulcrum for speech and music perception

Abstract: The Auditory cortex sits at the center of all auditory-motor tasks and percepts, from listening to our voice as we speak, to the music that we play, and to the complex sound mixtures that we seek to perceive. The auditory cortex orchestrates all these demands by segregating the sound sources and attending to a few, and then directing them to be semantically decoded in the language or music areas of the brain. It also sends collateral signals to motor areas where the sounds could be produced and controlled (e.g., the vocal tract or hands). All these regions in turn reflect back to the auditory cortex their expectations and predictions of the activations due to the incoming sound streams.I shall review in this talk computational models of several such phenomena, and discuss the experimental findings that test their underlying assumptions in humans and ferrets while they segregate speech mixtures, imagine music, or listen to songs.