Iternship at the Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing

rtAIM

In 2006 I did an internship at the Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing, Physiology department, University of Cambridge. Tom Walters and I wrote a piece of software called rtAIM, otherwise known as AIM-C.

rtAIM is a real-time implementation of the Auditory Image Model of peripheral auditory processing. An implementation in matlab already existed, but this was not suitable for real-time processing. Hence, a real-time version was created in C++.

At April 23, 2007, this work was presented at the fluid dynamics laboratory, Eindhoven University of Technology. The presentation covered an introduction to the field of auditory perception research, an explanation of the auditory image model, and a demonstration of rtAIM. Sheets are available.

Please look at AIM-C at CNBH for current work and public releases of the software.

For insiders there is a password-protected area.

Related links

• Research groups
  • Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing, Cambridge
  • Auditory perception group, Cambridge
  • University of Essex hearing lab
  • Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge
• Hearing and beyond
  • Wikipedia: Hearing (sense), Ear
  • The cochlea homepage
  • Promenade 'round the cochlea
  • The auditory central nervous system
  • Sound Design, a course on sound perception
  • Electroglottography, on human voice production
• Related software
  • AIM, implementations of the auditory image model by CNBH
  • STRAIGHT, speech manipulation tool by Hideki Kawahara
  • DSAM, development system for auditory modelling
• Sounds
  • Audifon, auditory phonetics demonstrations
• Journals
  • Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
  • Acta Acustica united with Acustica
• rtAIM development
  • Libraries used
    • FFTW, the fast fourier transform library
    • wxWidgets, cross-platform GUI library [class reference: 2.4.2, 2.6.3]
    • libsndfile, audio file reading and writing [api reference]
    • PortAudio, cross-platform audio playing and recording [docs]
    • Plotutils, 2d image plotting library [manual]
    • OpenGL, fast 3d graphics [guide, reference]
    • FTGL, OpenGL truetype font library
  • Tools used
    • C++ programming language
      • Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming Using C++
      • Object-oriented programming at Wikipedia
      • Object FAQ
    • SCons, software construction tool (like make) [manpage, user's guide, wiki, python]
    • Doxygen, system for generating documentation out of source and embedded comments [manual]
    • Codeblocks, a cross-platform C++ IDE
    • Microsoft Visual Studio C++ Express and the platform SDK
    • Xcode, an IDE for Mac OSX
  • Open Group Base Specification
  • Microsoft developer library
• Possibly interesting high-level audio processing languages/frameworks
  • Linux DSP software
  • CLAM, C++ library for audio and music
  • StreamIt
  • ChucK
  • Pd?