Hearing-Related Courses

HEARING RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES

SEMINARS ARE GENERALLY HELD ON FRIDAYS AT 10:30 IN ROOM 203 OF 44 CUMMINGTON STREET.
For a map showing Cummington Street, see MAPS on the BU web site. (The College of Engineering building on Cummington Street is number 29.)
Exceptions in time or location will be noted below for any talks that are different.

Coffee is served around 10:20. The format is relatively informal with opportunities for questions and discussions.

For more information, contact Lingqiang Kong.

Upcoming (or recent) Seminars

May 16, 2008
Dr. John Agapiou
Rockefeller University
"Low-frequency envelope sensitivity produces asymmetric binaural tuning curves"

May 23, 2008
Yuxuan Zhang
Northwestern University
"Binaural hearing: naive performance and learning"

May 30, 2008
Prof. Claus-Peter Richter, M.D., Ph.D.
Director of Resident Research
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Title: TBD

June 20, 2008
Ram Krips, Ph.D. Candidate
School of Electrical Engineering
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, Israel

"Stochastic Properties of Neural Coincidence Detector cells"

ABSTRACT

Neural information is characterized by sets of spiking events that travel within the brain through neuron junctions that receive, transmit and process streams of spikes. Coincidence detection (CD) is one of the common ways to describe the functionality of a single neural cell.
An analytical derivation of the output stochastic behaviour of a coincidence detector with both excitatory and inhibitory inputs will be presented. The stochastic behaviour of the inputs is described as a non-homogeneous Poisson process (NHPP). The derivation, which is based on an efficient breakdown of the cell into basic functional elements, results in an output process whose behaviour can be approximated as a NHPP as long as the coincidence interval is much smaller than the refractory period of the cell's inputs. Intuitively, the approximation is valid as long as the processing rate is much faster than the incoming information rate. For example an excitatory excitatory (EE) nucleus that receives 2 inputs each behaves as a NHPP with instantaneous rates (IRs) LAMBDA-1 and LAMBDA-2, and a coincidence window (DELTA), then EE output is also NHPP and its IR can be expressed simply (XXX). Similarly EI cell output yields YYYYY, where LAMBDA-E and LAMBDA-I are the excitatory and inhibitory input IRs.
This derivation enables predictions of numerous properties, for example: (1) Decrease in spiking rate at higher brain levels. (2) SNR improvement. (3) Prediction of binaural localization Performance: JND for ITD, ILD and MAA.
NOTE: It is my fault that the expressions XXXX and YYYY are missing... Steve Colburn

June 23, 2008
G. Christopher Stecker, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Speech and Hearing Sciences
University of Washington, Seattle
"Combining binaural cues across time and type"

Past Seminars 2008

January 4, 2008
David Perry
Department of Otolaryngology, University of Melbourne
and
The Bionic Ear Institute
Melbourne, Australia
Topic related to Cochlear Implant stimulation and central auditory system changes

February 29, 2008 - SPECIAL LOCATION
677 Beacon St. Rm B02 (*Note Special Location*)

Cameron Morland, Ph.D Candidate
Dept. of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Boston University

"What it is like to be a Bat: A Sonar system for Humans"

March 7, 2008
Philip S. Lobel
Professor, Boston University Marine Program
Department of Biology
Boston University
"Fish Sex: their sounds of ecstasy fall on our deaf ears"

March 14, 2008 -- SPRING BREAK
Oded Ghitza, Ph.D.
Center for Biodynamics
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Hearing Research Center
Boston University
"On the possible role of brain rhythms in speech perception"

March 21, 2008
Roozbeh Ghaffari Ph.D Candidate
Research Laboratory of Electronics
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Mass. Inst. of Tech.
Cambridge, MA
"Longitudinally propagating traveling waves of the mammalian tectorial membrane"

March 28, 2008 -- NO SEMINAR
BME Graduate Student Event

April 4, 2008
Prof. Elliot Saltzman
Boston University and Haskins Laboratories

"A task-dynamic toolkit for modeling the effects of prosodic structure on articulation"

April 11, 2008
Erick Gallun
Research Investigator
National Center for Rehabilitative Auditory Research
Portland VA Medical Center
Portland, Oregon
"Amplitude modulation sensitivity as a mechanism for speech perception"

April 18, 2008
Christopher Shera
Eaton-Peabody Laboratory
Mass. Eye and Ear Infirmary
Boston, MA
Title: "Coherent reflection and its discontents"

April 25, 2008
Dr. Jyrki Ahveninen
Department of Radiology, MGH
Harvard Medical School

"Spatiotemporal brain imaging of short-term plasticity of human auditory cortex"

May 1, 2008 --- SPECIAL LOCATION, SPECIAL DAY
SPECIAL LOCATION -- Room 150; 64 Cummington Street
Prof. David Poeppel
Department of Linguistics & Department of Biology
Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program
University of Maryland, College Park
"Temporal primitives in auditory cognition and speech perception"

ABSTRACT:
Generating usable internal representations of speech input, or an auditory scene more generally, requires, among other operations, fractionating the signals into temporal units/chunks of the appropriate granularity. Adopting (and adapting) Marr's (1982) approach to vision, a perspective is outlined that formulates linking hypotheses between specific neurobiological mechanisms (for example cortical oscillations and phase-locking) and the representations that underlie auditory cognition (for example syllables). Focusing on the implementational and algorithmic levels of description, I argue that the perception of sound patterns requires a multi-time resolution analysis. In particular, recent experimental data from psychophysics, MEG (Luo & Poeppel, 2007), and concurrent EEG/fMRI (Giraud et al., 2007) suggest that there exist two privileged time scales that form the basis for constructing elementary auditory percepts. These "temporal primitives" permit the construction of the internal representations that mediate the analysis of speech and other acoustic signals.

May 2, 2008 -- NO SEMINAR
The talk of Prof. Karen Helfer, originally scheduled for May 2, will be rescheduled for the upcoming fall

May 9, 2008
Carol Espy Wilson, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Institute for Systems Research
University of Maryland
"Speech Enhancement based on the Modified Phase-Opponency Model"

ABSTRACT

In this talk I will discuss a speech enhancement algorithm we have developed that is based on the auditory PO model proposed for detection of tones in noise. The PO model includes a physiologically realistic mechanism for processing the information in neural discharge times and exploits the frequency-dependent phase properties of the tuned filters in the auditory periphery by using a cross-auditory-never-fiber coincidence detection for extracting temporal cues. An important feature of the PO model is that it does not need to estimate the noise characteristics, nor does it assume that the noise satisfies any statistical model. We modified the PO model (MPO) so that its basic functionality was maintained, but the properties of the model can be analyzed and modified independently. In addition, we improved on its performance by coupling the PO model with our Aperiodicity, Periodicity, Pitch (APP) detector. Presently, we are investigating additional processing to further improve the performance of the MPO-APP at low signal-to-noise ratios (6 dB and lower).

Past Seminars 2007

January 19, 2007
Madhu Shashanka
Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory
Hearing Research Center and
Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems
Boston University
http://cns-web.bu.edu/~mvss/
"Probabilistic Models for Single-Channel Audio Processing"

January 26, 2007
Mario Ruggiero, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Northwestern University
http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/csd/faculty/Mario_Ruggero/
"The human ear is unexceptional"

February 9, 2007
No regular HRC Seminar ... but at 2:00 pm, Kamal Sen is speaking at the
CENTER FOR ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS, DEPARTMENT OF COGNITIVE AND NEURAL SYSTEMS
AND
Center of Excellence for Learning in Education, SCIENCE, and Technology (CELEST)
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
2:00 PM
Auditorium, Room B02
Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems
677 Beacon Street
Boston MA 02215

Kamal Sen, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Boston University
"Neural Discrimination of Complex Natural Sounds in Songbirds"

February 16, 2007
Robert Burkard, Ph.D.
Professor, Rehabilitation Sciences
Adjunct Professor, Psychology
Associate Professor, Otolaryngology
University at Buffalo, The State University of NY
"Is Auditory Neuropathy/Auditory Dys-synchrony Likely the Result of Selective Inner Hair Cell Loss?"

February 23, 2007
No Seminar

March 2, 2007
Antje Ihlefeld
Ph.D. Candidate in Cognitive & Neural Systems Auditory Neuroscience Lab
Boston University
http://cns.bu.edu/~ihlefeld
Dissertation defense: "Strategies of spatial listening for speech comprehension"
USUAL TIME AND PLACE - 10:30 AM; 44 Cummington Street (ERB), Room 203

March 9, 2007 - NO SEMINAR
**No Seminar. BME open house**

March 16, 2007 - NO SEMINAR
**No Seminar. BU SPRING BREAK**

March 23, 2007 - NO SEMINAR
**No Seminar. BME open house**

March 30, 2007 - NO SEMINAR

April 6, 2007
Douglas Vetter, Ph.D.
Tufts Univ. School of Medicine
Dept. of Neuroscience
Dept. of Biomedical Engineering
Tufts University
http://www.tufts.edu/sackler/facultyIntros/vetterD.html
"Corticotropin releasing hormone receptors of the inner ear- A pathway to prevention of trauma induced deafness?"

April 13, 2007
Lynne Werner, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences
University of Washington, Seattle
"How Infants Deal with Uncertainty"

April 20, 2007
David O'Gorman, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Center for BioDynamics and Hearing Research Center
Departments of Mathematics and Biomedical Engineering
Boston University
"Dynamical mechanisms of neural firing irregularity and modulation sensitivity"
Abstract available here

April 27, 2007
John Buck, Ph.D.
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth
http://www.umassd.edu/engineering/ece/people/faculty/buck.cfm
"Cepstral processing models for bat biosonar"

May 4, 2007 - NO SEMINAR
**No Seminar. Senior Projects.**

May 11, 2007
Timothy J. Gardner, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Fee Lab
Mass. Institute of Technology
http://web.mit.edu/tgardner/www/
Title: TBA

May 18, 2007
Cynthia Moss, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology
University of Maryland
Director of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/psyc/batlab/people/cindy.html
"Spatial orientation by sonar: What the bat's voice tells the bat's brain"
Abstract available here

May 25, 2007
Brad May, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Otolaryngology
Johns Hopkins University
http://www.maybj.com
"The auditory representation of spectral cues for sound localization"

May 24, 2007 - SPECIAL TIME - 10 AM
Kamal Sen, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Boston University
http://www.bu.edu/bme/faculty/?prof=kamalsen&faculty=32&first=15
"Neural Discrimination of Complex Natural Sounds in Songbirds"

June 1, 2007
Dominic Mangiardi
Ph.D. Candidate in Biomedical Engineering
Boston University
Dissertation Defense:
"Molecular and quantitative spatial analysis of aminoglycoside-induced hair cell death and regeneration in the avian cochlea"
Abstract available here

June 25, 2007 -- 10:30 am MONDAY
Matthew Goupell, Ph.D.
Austrian Academy of Sciences
Acoustics Research Institute
Vienna, Austria
"Improving cochlear implant ITD perception"

July 6, 2007 -- 10:30 am FRIDAY -- ROOM 401 of 44 Cummington St (same building; different room)
Chuping Liu, Ph.D candidate
University of Southern California
Department of Auditory Implant and Perception at House Ear Institute
Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT
"Speech Perception Optimization for Cochlear Implants through Signal Processing Approaches"

July 13, 2007 -- 10:30 am FRIDAY
Lisa Shatz, PH.D.
Department of Electrical Engineering
Suffolk University
"The response of rat vibrissae to sound"

July 23, 2007 -- 10:30 am MONDAY
Robert Carlyon
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
Medical Research Council, UK
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/people-pages.php?id=16
"Pitch perception & sound segregation by cochlear implant users and normal-hearing listeners"

July 24, 2007 -- 10:30 am TUESDAY
Dr. Ingrid Johnsrude
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge UK
Dept. of Psychology, Queens University, Canada
"Perceptual learning and voice familiarity facilitate speech comprehension: Under what conditions, and how?"

September 14, 2007 -- 10:00 am (NOTE SPECIAL TIME)
Nicole Marrone, PH.D. Candidate
Sargent College
Boston University
Dissertation Defense
"The benefit of separation between multiple talkers: A comparison of aided and unaided listening in reverberant rooms"

September 21, 2007 -- 10:30 am (USUAL TIME)
Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Departments of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Biomedical Engineering
Boston University
"Why hearing impairment may degrade selective attention"

ABSTRACT: In everyday settings, the ability to selectively attend is critical for communication. Most normal-hearing listeners are able to selectively attend to a talker of interest in a sea of competing sources, and to rapidly shift attention as the need arises. However, hearing impaired (HI) listeners and cochlear implant (CI) users have difficulty communicating when there are multiple sources. This talk will review experiments investigating selective attention in normal listeners. Results suggest that selective attention operates to select out perceptual "objects," and thus depends directly on the ability to separate a source of interest from a mixture of competing sources. In turn, results suggest that one important factor affecting how well hearing impaired listeners can communicate in everyday settings is their ability to perceptually organize the auditory scene.

September 28, 2007 -- 10:30 am (USUAL TIME)
Daniel E. Shub, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
University of Pennsylvania
"Psychophysical spectro-temporal receptive fields in an informational masking task"

ABSTRACT: Traditionally, comparison between psychophysical and physiological data has relied on trial-based approaches were a short stimulus is presented and a response is recorded. Characterizing neurons in the auditory system with trial-based approaches, however, is often less efficient than approaches that utilize continuous stimuli (i.e., not trial based). In this talk, a psychophysical method, analogous to the physiological methods used to estimate the spectro-temporal receptive fields (STRFs) of neurons, is introduced. Human subjects were trained to respond as quickly as possible whenever they detected a target sequence of four 50-ms tone pips with a frequency of 1000 Hz in the presence of a masker. The masker consisted of temporally and spectrally random 50-ms tone pips. The expected number of masker pips at any moment in time was six. The masker was continuously presented and the target was added at random times. Each block lasted for approximately five minutes and there were on average 100 signal presentations during a block. The responses were sorted as either hits or false alarms and then response-triggered averaged spectrograms for the hits and false alarms were calculated. The average stimulus from when false alarms occurred is similar to a noisy version of the target signal; subjects responded that there was a signal about 700 ms after the stimulus had energy at the signal frequency. The measured response-triggered spectrograms are consistent with previous estimates of spectro-temporal weighting patterns from trial-based informational masking tasks. An advantage of the current method is that it provides a means of comparing psychophysical results to physiological STRFs. [Supported by NIH DC02012]

October 5, 2007 -- NO SEMINAR
HAPPY COLUMBUS-DAY WEEKEND!

October 12, 2007
Adrian (KC) Lee, Ph.D.
Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
"Influence of Spatial Cues on the Identification and the Localization of Objects in the Auditory Foreground"

October 19 AND 20, 2007 -- BINAURAL BASH
For more information, contact Nancy Maguire nmaguire@bu.edu.

October 26, 2007
Psyche Loui, Ph.D.
Department of Neurology
Beth Israel Hospital / Harvard Medical School
Title: "Rapid Statistical Learning of a New Musical System"

November 2, 2007
Norbert Kopco, Ph.D.
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University
Dept. of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Boston University
Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia
"Visual calibration of auditory spatial perception in humans and monkeys"

November 9, 2007
Eric Thompson
Ph.D. student, Centre for Applied Hearing Research
Technical University of Denmark
CURRENTLY: Dept. of Cognitive and Neural Systems and Hearing Research Center, Boston University
"Binaural processing of fluctuating interaural level differences"

ABSTRACT
Interaural level fluctuations can be created by amplitude modulations in a reverberant environment due to interaural phase differences in the modulation transfer function. In order to understand how envelopes are processed in reverberant environments, two psychophysical amplitude modulation detection experiments were performed. The first experiment was aimed at measuring a baseline sensitivity to interaural level fluctuations by measuring the minimum modulation depth required to discriminate between interaurally homophasic and antiphasic amplitude modulation imposed on high-frequency pure-tone or narrow-band noise carriers. In addition, ILD modulation frequency tuning curves were obtained by measuring the antiphasic/homophasic AM discrimination thresholds in the presence of masking modulators. In the second experiment, subjective modulation transfer functions were measured monaurally and binaurally with a dichotic impulse response. The results showed that an interaural phase difference in the modulation transfer function can be used to give a binaural advantage over "best ear" listening in a modulation detection experiment.

November 16, 2007 --- NO SEMINAR

November 23, 2007 --- NO SEMINAR
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

November 30, 2007
Rapeechai (Pom) Navawongse
Ph.D. Student, Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University
"Extracellular Single Neuron Recording in Dorsal Cochlear Nucleus of the Awake Gerbil"

December 7, 2007
Pierre Divenyi, Ph.D.
(pdivenyi@ebire.org)
Speech and Hearing Research Laboratory
Department of Veterans Affairs
VA Northern California Health Care System and East Bay Institute for Research and Education
Martinez, California
TITLE: "Decomposition of speech into articulatory gesture functions: Answers and questions"
ABSTRACT
Speech is produced by an ensemble of articulatory gestures that dynamically change properties of the vocal chord and the vocal tract. Thus, in principle, there must be an algorithmic way of transforming the ensemble of gestures into the speech signal and, conversely, transforming the speech signal into the set of gesture functions that generated it in the first place. The reality, unfortunately, is more complicated because, as shown by many mathematically quite capable researchers, both the transform and its inverse can lead to multi-valued functions. In an ongoing work at our lab, we adapted a procedure of speech synthesis from articulatory gestures (Saltzman, 1986; Saltzman and Kelso, 1987; Browman and Goldstein,1990) to associate the speech signal with the underlying gesture functions. A machine learning experiment performing such association in a number of training tokens shows that gesture functions can be predicted from a test token's waveform. By considering the ensemble of gesture functions as an equivalent representation of the speech signal, we analyzed listeners' responses to a series of disyllabic spondee words disfigured by replacing their centers with various non-speech fillers, in terms of the information transmitted by each of the gestures. Such an analysis has the potential of offering way for the construction of confusion matrices with the gestures representing continuous analogs of the Jakobsonian distinctive features, and potentially allows differentiation of bottom-up and top-down processes for the intelligibility of speech presented under inclement acoustic conditions.
Saltzman, E. L. (1986). Task dynamic coordination of the speech articulators: a preliminary model. In H. Heuer, and C. Fromm (Eds.), Generation and modulation of action patterns (Vol. 15, pp. 129-144). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Saltzman, E. L., and Kelso, J. A. (1987). Skilled actions: A task dynamic approach. Psychological Rewiew, 94, 84-106.
Browman, C. P., and Goldstein, L. (1990). Representation and reality: physical systems and phonological structure. Journal of Phonetics, 18, 411-424.

FOR LISTINGS OF SEMINARS IN PAST YEARS, CLICK BELOW:

Past Seminars - 2006

Past Seminars - 2005

Past Seminars - 2004

Past Seminars - 2003

Past Seminars - 2002

Past Seminars - 2001

Past Seminars - 2000

Past Seminars - 1999

Past Seminars - 1998

Past Seminars - 1997

HEARING RELATED COURSES

• Dept. of Biomedical Engineering
• Dept. of Cognitive and Neural Systems
• Dept. of Communication Disorders
• Dept. of Medicine
• Other

Dept. of Biomedical Engineering

Prereq: ENG BE 401 and graduate standing; seniors with consent of instructor. Focuses
on the properties of the membranes of nerve and muscle cells. Classical models of
resting potentials, action potentials, synaptic transmission, and sensory receptors are
treated. The structure and function of single ionic channels are characterized in detail
from patch-clamp recordings, neuropharmacological studies, and molecular studies.
Mechanisms of muscle contraction and other forms of cellular motility are also covered.
4 class. 2 pract. 4 cr

ENG BE 701 Auditory Signal Processing: Peripheral

Prereq: ENG BE 507, ENG EK 500. This is one in a pair of courses (ENG BE 701 and
BE 702) on auditory signal processing that presents an integrated study of auditory
physiology and psychophysics. Focuses on the auditory periphery and includes topics
from physical acoustics to the activity of the primary auditory neurons. Psychophysical
phenomena covered in this course are those that appear to be directly related to constraints
imposed by the physiology of the auditory periphery. These include hearing thresholds,
detection of signals in noise, intensity perception and loudness, and frequency selectivity.
4 class. 2 pract. 4 cr

ENG BE 702 Auditory Signal Processing: Central

Prereq: ENG BE 701. Focuses on the neurophysiology and neuroanatomy of the
auditory brainstem, although neural activity up to cortical levels is also included.
Psychophysical phenomena in this course include pitch perception, sound localization,
and binaural detection phenomena.
4 class. 2 pract. 4 cr

Dept. of Cognitive and Neural Systems

Prereq: Calculus and MATLAB skills, or permission of instructor. This course
examines auditory perception with emphasis on models of human performance.
Basic signal processing, probability, and anatomy and physiology of the auditory
system are introduced as needed to allow students from varied backgrounds to
analyze models of psychophysical performance. Topics will range from
perception of simple tones to speech perception.
4 cr, 2nd sem.

Dept. of Communication Disorders

Attributes of sound and the mechanism of hearing pertaining to classical study of
the science of audiology. Elementary physics of sound and the decibel, anatomy
of the aural mechanism, essentials of hearing theory, pathologies of the auditory
and related systems, basic pure tone audiometric technique.
4 cr, 1st sem.

SAR CD 542 Aural Rehabilitation

Theory and techniques of aural rehabilitation of hearing-impaired individuals of
all ages and etiologies. Covers current case management strategies, traditional
methods of speech reading, and auditory training.
4 cr, 1st sem.

SAR CD 630 Diagnostic Audiology

Includes both lecture and laboratory components. Learn basic principles of
auditory assessment, including basic physics of sound, pure tone and speech
testing, masking, impedance, and testing. 4 cr, 1st sem.

SAR CD 812 Computer Methods in Speech and Hearing Research

The uses of digital computers in speech and hearing research. Includes A/D
and D/A conversion, real-time operating systems, generation of digital signals,
and algorithms for sampling and analyzing speech. (Offered alternate years.)
4 cr, 2nd sem.

SAR CD 815 Speech Perception and Intelligibility

Properties of the speech waveform that convey information. Consideration of
articulation theory, filtering and quantizing speech, speech quality, and effects
of hearing loss on speech perception. (Offered alternate years.)
4 cr, 2nd sem.

SAR CD 820 Hearing Science I

A review of the basic technical skills needed by audiologists. Topics include
acoustics, electronic instrumentation, standards and calibration procedures, and
electroacoustics. (Offered alternate years.)
4 cr, 1st sem.

SAR CD 821 Hearing Science II

Focuses on the scientific basis for and implementation of specific behavioral
and physiological measurement procedures. (Offered alternate years.)
4 cr, 2nd sem.

SAR CD 823 Experimental Audiology

The implications of basic auditory research for the identification, diagnosis,
and rehabilitation of the hearing impaired are critically evaluated. Attempts
to close the gap between the basic auditory scientist and the clinical
audiologist. (Offered alternate years.)
4 cr, 1st sem.

SAR CD 825 Advanced Diagnostic Audiology

Audiological assessment involving special impedance tests, tinnitus testing,
central auditory testing, electronystagmography, high-frequency audiometry,
site of lesion, and other special tests.
4 cr, 1st sem.

SAR CD 829 Advanced Auditory Rehabilitation

Theory and philosophy of aural rehabilitation of hearing-impaired children
and adults. Emphasis on research in lipreading and auditory training, clinical
management, and therapy techniques.
4 cr

SAR CD 840 Auditory Evoked Potentials I

Principles of signal averaging, measurement of acoustic transients, and normative
aspects of auditory evoked potentials. Survey of electrocochleography, brainstem
auditory evoked responses, middle latency components, the late components, and
the endogenous potentials. For all responses, the effects of stimulus manipulations
and subject variables are examined. (Offered alternate years.) 4 cr, 1st sem.

SAR CD 841 Auditory Prostheses

Prereq: SAR CD 535. The hearing aid as a tool for habilitation and rehabilitation
in the pediatric, geriatric, and general population. Includes discussions of the concepts
of amplification, the selection process, ear molds and their design, cochlear implants,
listening devices and applications for various special needs populations.
(Offered alternate years.) 4 cr

SAR CD 842 Pathologies of the Ear

A comprehensive examination of diseases affecting the auditory system. The audiologic
implications of medical diagnosis and treatment of auditory pathology.
(Offered alternate years.) 4 cr, 2nd sem.

SAR CD 844 Industrial Audiology

Prereq: SAR CD 535. Implications of noise and noise exposure in environmental
and industrial settings.Identification and measurement of noise levels, and effects
of exposure on the auditory mechanism. Legislation
and preventive measures.
4 cr

SAR CD 845 Psychoacoustics

Prereq: SAR CD 535. Fundamental concepts in normal audition. Includes several
of the following: the psychophysical basis of audition, sensitivity, acuity, masking,
loudness, adaptation, binaural phenomena and localization. (Offered alternate years.)
4 cr, 2nd sem.

SAR CD 846 Biophysics of the Hearing Mechanism

Survey of entire auditory mechanism from auricle to auditory cortex. Contribution
of each anatomical section to audition. Mechanics, electrophysiology, and anatomy
of the auditory mechanism in detail. (Offered alternate years.)
4 cr, either sem.

SAR CD 847 Audiology: Special Needs

Assessment strategies for clinical subgroups having special needs, including geriatric,
pediatric, and multiply handicapped. Emphasis on literature supporting behavioral
and physiological procedures.
4 cr, 1st sem.

Dept. of Medicine

• MED ME 500 - Microscopic Anatomy
• MED ME 701 - Gross Anatomy of the Head and Neck
• MED ME 702 - Advanced Neurosciences: The Sensory Systems
• MED ME 703 - Medical Neurosciences
• MED ME 707 - Techniques in Neuroscience
• MED ME 709 - Neural Development and Plasticity

Courses on Related Topics in the College of Engineering

• ENG AM 520 - Introduction to Acoustics
• ENG AM 522 - Underwater Acoustics
• ENG AM 708 - Waves in Fluids
• ENG AM 760 - Active Control of Sound and Vibration
• ENG SC 505 - Stochastic Processes
• ENG SC 512 - Digital Signal Processing
• ENG SC 716 - Advanced Digital Signal Processing
• ENG SC 717 - Image Reconstruction and Restoration
• ENG SC 719 - Statistical Pattern Recognition
• ENG SC 745 - Digital Speech Processing