Online Seminar - Representations of complex sound features in auditory cortex

The early auditory system decomposes incoming sounds into a collection of sine waves with different frequencies. But we would not describe our everyday experience of hearing sound as one of “perceiving frequencies”. Rather, we hear complex and behaviourally relevant sound features, such as reverberation, timbre and pitch. Pitch is our perception of the tonal quality of sounds, and plays key roles in our experience of speech and music. The neural underpinnings of pitch perception remain poorly understood and heavily debated. I will discuss our electrophysiological, behavioural and 2-photon calcium imaging experiments in ferrets, which offer insights into how populations of neurons in auditory cortex encode the pitch of sound. I will discuss the extent to which well-known tonotopic maps of sound frequency in the brain may contribute to pitch processing, and the open question of whether auditory cortex may contain a specialized pitch processing centre.

This seminar will be given online via Zoom. Details in attached poster.