MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
Current major research themes include cochlear-implant research, from front-end signal processing to objective measures of neural health, neuroplasticity in normal and hearing-impaired listeners, binaural processing, the effects of hearing loss throughout the lifespan, and both physical and computational models of hearing.
The group benefits from a wealth of world-class expertise in psychology, neuroscience, engineering, surgery, speech science, audiology, auditory physiology, electrophysiology, material science, and computer science. We use a wide variety of research tools to produce cutting-edge research. These include psychoacoustics, virtual reality, speech perception, web-based data collection, objective measures such as EEG, biophysical and computational models of the inner ear, cadaveric studies, clinical models, and paediatric studies.
The CHG is open to collaboration with other hearing and speech research groups around the world, and can be contacted in the first instance at chg@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk or tweet us @CamHearingGroup
Conferences
Auditory Science Meeting (ASM) 2024:
It is our pleasure to announce the Auditory Science Meeting (ASM) 2024 on Thursday 26 – Friday 27th September 2024.
Please note that this is the UK Acoustics Network (UKAN) meeting that has been called ‘Basic Auditory Science (BAS)’ in the past as well as ‘Ear & Hear.’
ASM2024 will be hosted by the Cambridge Hearing Group and take place at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. There will be affordable accommodation at the college and a conference dinner will be included in the price.
Abstract submission is now open. The Deadline for submission is 26 June, 2024. You can submit your abstract on the Conference Website.
We look forward to seeing you in Cambridge in the autumn.
Other Business
Please note that our primary website is currently under construction. We appreciate your patience with this.
Software
Carlyon Filter Model: Carlyon et al ( 2005) described a simple model which predicts cochlear implant users’ thresholds for electrical pulse trains. We have found that it successfully captures the effects of inter-phase gap, phase duration, and pulse rate over a wide range, and works both for symmetric pulses and for “pseudomonophasic” pulse trains. The model works by by passing the stimulus through a low-pass filter designed to capture the effects of frequency on detection thresholds for sinusoidal electrical stimulation. The software generates the pulse train for you, but can easily be modified to generate sine waves or indeed any analogue waveform. It is written in MATLAB and should run on any platform supporting that language, although we have only tested it on various versions of windows.
The software can be downloaded here. Please note that use of the software is at your own risk and implies acceptance of the disclaimer shown in the readme file.
We hope that you find the software useful; if so please cite the following publication, which contains full details of how the model works:
Carlyon, R. P., van Wieringen, A., Deeks, J. M., Long, C. J., Lyzenga, J., & Wouters, J. (2005). Effect of inter-phase gap on the sensitivity of cochlear implant users to electrical stimulation. Hearing research, 205(1-2), 210–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2005.03.021
webSTRIPES: Archer-Boyd et al (2018) described a spectro-temporal ripple for investigating processor effectiveness (STRIPES), a test that is a psychophysical measure of spectro-temporal resolution in cochlear-implant (CI) listeners. An online application using wireless streaming (webSTRIPES) as a remote test has now also been developed.
The software can be downloaded here. Please note that the use of the software is at your own risk and it is the responsibility of the user to verify safety prior to use.
We hope that you find the software useful; if so please cite the following publication, which contains details of the development of webSTRIPES:
Archer-Boyd, A. W., Harland, A., Goehring, T., & Carlyon, R. P. (2023). An online implementation of a measure of spectro-temporal processing by cochlear-implant listeners. JASA express letters, 3(1), 014402. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0016838
