Speech processing with a cortical representation of audio

Neurophysiological studies in the primary auditory cortex have recently demonstrated a rich diversity of responses that provide an explicit multidimensional representation of phonemic acoustic features (Mesgarani 2008). Specifically, distinct subsets of cortical neurons are activated by articulatory gestures and dynamics that are characteristic of different phonemes. Here we use a computational cortical model to illustrate how these phonetic features appear in such a multiresolution representation. We also review how this representation has been successfully applied in variety of speech processing tasks including robust speech discrimination, speech enhancement and phoneme recognition.