Book Review: Jan Schnupp, Israel Nelken, & Andrew King, Auditory neuroscience: Making sense of sound

Auditory Neuroscience: Making Sense of Sound is an excellent new book written by Jan Schnupp, Israel Nelken, and Andrew King that offers an engagingly comprehensive introduction to auditory neuroscience. For this book the authors have decided to drop the standard neuroscience textbook strategy of organizing their discussion around anatomical structures. Instead, the authors have adopted an alternative but uniquely effective organizational strategy, first using Chapters 1 and 2 to offer a preparatory background on the fundamentals of physical acoustics and the physiology of the ear, then subsequently using Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 to offer focused discussion on the neurobiology of pitch perception, speech processing, sound source localization, and the perceptual separation of sound mixtures, respectively, and finally, using Chapters 7 and 8 to conclude the book with discussion of neuroplasticity and recent technological advancements for the treatment of hearing loss. Each chapter is self-contained, offers approximately two lectures’ worth of study material, and is written with remarkable lucidity and wit for a neuroscience text. This makes the book an equally excellent resource for either standard coursework or independent study. Though the book was written “with an advanced undergraduate readership in mind, aiming mostly at students in the biological or medical sciences, audiology, psychology, neuroscience, or speech science,” the topical organization of the book along with the general ease with which it reads makes it an especially valuable resource for anyone that has a basic background in biology and psychology, is fascinated by hearing and sound, and is eager to learn more. For instance Chapter 6 of the book focuses on auditory scene analysis and considers issues surrounding the existence and nature of auditory objects, and such a chapter might be usefully integrated into a graduate seminar on the cognitive science of music, the philosophy of music, or even music theory, in addition to courses focused more directly on auditory neuroscience itself. In Chapter 1 the book offers a useful introduction to auditory neuroscience by discussing the fundamentals of physical acoustics and how sound is generated by vibrating objects in the environment. It offers an exceptional review of basic mathematical concepts for those with little or no prior knowledge of mathematics and devotes individual sections to the discussion of simple harmonic motion (1.1), modes of vibration and damping (1.2), Fourier analysis and spectra (1.3), windowing and spectrograms (1.4), impulse responses and linear filters (1.5), voices (1.6), sound propagation (1.7), and sound intensity (1.8). Chapter 2 then proceeds to focus on the physiology of the ear and discusses how sound as a physical phenomenon becomes sound as a perceptual phenomenon. It reviews the basic anatomical structure of the outer, middle, and inner ear and devotes individual sections to the discussion of sound capture and transmission to the inner ear (2.1), transduction from vibration to voltage in hair cells (2.2), active amplification of outer hair cells (2.3), sound-encoding in neural firing patterns (2.4), and stations of the central auditory pathway (2.5). Those drawn to the book for the purpose of 523548 MSX0010.1177/1029864914523548Musicae ScientiaeBook Review research-article2014