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, and by how information can be derived from sound. Specific interests include:

The Amazing Success of Biological Auditory Systems
Humans routinely perform tasks with sound that remain impossible for even the most powerful and sophisticated machine hearing systems. Following a conversation on a noisy city street, recognizing the sound of keys in a door, learning the sound of a new word - we do such things every day without a second thought. Their difficulty is revealed when we attempt to build machines that replicate our abilities. Understanding how we hear in these situations involves confronting the most difficult problems in audition. 

Computational Audition
I try to do experiments in humans that reveal how we succeed in situations where machine systems fail, and to use results in computational audio to motivate new experimental work. Recent work in this vein has focused on sound segregation, as well as audio representation.

Natural Sounds
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 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:

NEW: McDermott, J.H. & Simoncelli, E.P. (2011) Sound texture perception via statistics of the auditory periphery: Evidence from sound synthesis. Neuron, 71, 926-940.    download pdf
        * Listen to texture examples here...

McDermott, J.H., Wrobleski, D. & Oxenham, A.J. (2011) Recovering sound sources from embedded repetition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 1188-1193.    download pdf    listen to demos

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. (2009) The cocktail party problem. Current Biology, 19, R1024-R1027. download pdf  listen to demos

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     related page of demos

Music:

McDermott, J.H., Keebler, M.V., Micheyl, C. & Oxenham, A.J. (2010) Musical intervals and relative pitch: Frequency resolution, not interval resolution, is special. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128, 1943-1951. download pdf

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   related page of demos

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.