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Research examines human ability to use sound to understand events happening in the environment. Through perceptual experiments, it discovers acoustic cues that reveal attributes of sound events, and how knowledge of cue-attribute relationships influences recognition of sounds. It examines how knowledge influences the brain regions recruited for the perception of sound events. Multimodal experiments combine hearing and vision to investigate how sound affects gestures. Research on sound localization includes teaching naive listeners to learn how to extract information from echoes in their surroundings. Ongoing work involves perception of sound categories and the effects of unwanted sounds. Collaborative applications have been developed to test sound recognition in hearing-impaired listeners to improve performance using machine learning systems for sound event classification. The applications of this research have potential to enhance auditory displays, hearing aids, and aids for the visually impaired.
Admission is extremely competitive with no strict GPA cut-offs; holistic review is used.