In everyday life, most people can easily separate important sounds, like speech, from background sounds. Yet, when hearing problems arise, the complexity of the underlying neural processes becomes strikingly evident. Neural processing of everyday sounds is also central for auditory dysfunctions, where certain sounds start to preoccupy the mind to the detriment of life quality, such as in tinnitus or misophonia, where internal or external sounds cause strong emotional reactions. To characterise and treat such impairments we ultimately need to understand their neuronal mechanisms. We will combine brain-imaging (electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging) during tasks involving complex auditory scene analysis with emerging computational neuroscience methods to establish how the brain processes sound, in both the healthy and the hearing-impaired. Ultimately, we seek to uncover on a system level how different representations of auditory scenes emerge in the brain.
This research is supported by the Research Council of Finland.