A spike-based analogue circuit that emphasises in auditory stimuli

There is increasing evidence that onsets in an auditory stimulus can serve as important cues for useful functions including grouping components of the same sound and sound localisation. Motivated by this observation an analogue circuit has been designed to extract temporal information from an auditory input. The first component of the proposed system is a bank of subthreshold filters. The half-wave rectified output from each filter is then converted to a series of spikes by a set of parallel comparators, each of which detects when the power in a specific frequency interval exceeds a specific threshold. This system therefore creates a representation that emphasises the fine temporal structure in an auditory stimulus that can be used to separate different sound sources.