ONSETS: AN ELEMENT OF ECOLOGICAL SOUND INTERPRETATION

We justify the usage of onsets in sound processing by appealing to an ecological view of auditory processing. The biological basis for onset processing is briefly discussed, and we describe our biologically motivated approach for a spike-based system for onset detection. This is based on a auditory-nerve like representation (with multiple spike trains per filter-bank band) followed by a leaky integrateand-fire neuron with depressing synapses. Onsets are detected with essentially zero latency relative to the filter-bank. We show how this can be used to find the starts of certain phonemes in the TIMIT database, and how, by a small variation in the parameters, it can be used to detect amplitude modulation.