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Josh McDermott Center for Neural Science New York University 4 Washington Place, Rm 809 New York NY 10003-6603 212-992-8752 (phone) 212-995-4619 (fax) jhm - AT - cns - DOT - nyu - DOT - edu |
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Josh McDermott Center for Neural Science New York University 4 Washington Place, Rm 809 New York NY 10003-6603 212-992-8752 (phone) 212-995-4619 (fax) jhm - AT - cns - DOT - nyu - DOT - edu |
I study how people hear. I am generally fascinated by why things sound the way they do. Specific interests include:
"Real-World" Hearing
How do we follow a
conversation while walking down a noisy city street? Or reliably
recognize the sound of keys in a door? These are tasks we perform every
day without a second thought, but they are among the most challenging
problems for machine hearing systems. Understanding how we hear in
these situations involves confronting the most difficult computational problems in
audition.
Computational Audition
I try
to do experiments that reveal the computational strategies of the
auditory system, and to use results in computational audio to motivate new experimental work. I spend a lot of time
studying what naturally occurring sounds are made of, as this holds
many clues to how we hear them. Developing good models of natural
sounds also allows us to generate novel naturalistic sounds, which have many uses in experiments.
Music Perception
I have long-standing interests in the science of music. I continue
to think a lot about what makes music pleasurable, why some things
sound good and others do not, and why we have music to begin with.
These are big questions, but the right experiments have potential to
provide insight. Music
also provides great examples of many interesting phenomena in hearing,
and as such is a constant source of inspiration for basic hearing
research.
My Background
I
was trained as a vision scientist, but am now exclusively doing
hearing research. To add to the confusion, I recently moved to the Lab
for Computational Vision here at NYU, as the tools developed in
vision are also useful for understanding sound and hearing. I am
still working on sound, and will be for the forseeable future.
Some Recent Papers and Demos
Auditory Scene Analysis:
McDermott, J.H., Oxenham, A.J., & Simoncelli, E. (2009) Sound texture synthesis via filter statistics. Proceedings IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, Mohonk NY. download pdf
McDermott, J.H. & Oxenham, A.J. (2008) Spectral completion of partially masked sounds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (15), 5939-5944. download pdf
Music:
McDermott, J.H. (2009) What can experiments reveal about the origins of music? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 164-168. download pdf
McDermott, J.H., Lehr, A.J., Oxenham, A.J. (2008) Is relative pitch specific to pitch? Psychological Science, 19 (12), 1263-1271. download pdf
McDermott, J.H. (2008) The evolution of music. Nature, 453, 287-288. download pdf
McDermott, J.H. & Oxenham, A.J. (2008) Music perception, pitch, and the auditory system. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 18, 452-463. download pdf
A page with most of my vision papers.
A tutorial of all my motion demos.