Predicting Natural Sound Processing through Brain Activity Analysis.

Researchers at CNRS and Université Aix-Marseille and Maastricht University have used computational models to predict how the human brain transforms sounds into semantic representations of what is happening in the surrounding environment. The team assessed three classes of computational models, namely acoustic, semantic and sound-to-event DNNs, and found that DNN-based models greatly surpassed both computational approaches based on acoustics and techniques that characterize cerebral responses to sounds by placing them in different categories. The researchers also hypothesized that the human brain makes sense of natural sounds similarly to how it processes words.