The other structured noise is expected to idle the primary auditory cortex while actively interfering with other cortical areas. In addition, the PI shall assess how the background noises change the central representation of two representative foreground sounds - pure tones, and animal vocalizations. Adding Gaussian noise may be seen as simply increasing the amplitude of the internal noise of the auditory system. To test the hypothesis that specially structured random noises can differentially excite and idle different areas of the auditory cortex. To test the hypothesis the specific brain areas whose activity most parallels an animal's perceptual ability change depending on the type of background noise.
Humans communicate most naturally with speech and language.
Though most people communicate well in moderately noisy environments, background noise severely challenges automatic speech recognition systems. As the electronic intelligence within everyday objects grows, the need for human-machine speech interfaces is ever increasing. Learning how the auditory system reconfigures itself to achieve superior performance in the presence of noise is an important first step towards building engineered systems with the same abilities.