A Pole-Zero Filter Cascade Provides Good Fits to Human Masking Data and to Basilar Membrane and Neural Data

Mechanics of Hearing (2011)
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Abstract

A cascade of two-pole–two-zero filters with level-dependent pole and
zero dampings, with few parameters, can provide a good match to human
psychophysical and physiological data. The model has been fitted to
data on detection threshold for tones in notched-noise masking,
including bandwidth and filter shape changes over a wide range of
levels, and has been shown to provide better fits with fewer parameters
compared to other auditory filter models such as gammachirps.
Originally motivated as an efficient machine implementation of auditory
filtering related to the WKB analysis method of cochlear wave
propagation, such filter cascades also provide good fits to mechanical
basilar membrane data, and to auditory nerve data, including linear
low-frequency tail response, level-dependent peak gain, sharp tuning
curves, nonlinear compression curves, level-independent zero-crossing
times in the impulse response, realistic instantaneous frequency
glides, and appropriate level-dependent group delay even with
minimum-phase response. As part of exploring different level-dependent
parameterizations of such filter cascades, we have identified a simple
sufficient condition for stable zero-crossing times, based on the
shifting property of the Laplace transform: simply move all the
$s$-domain poles and zeros by equal amounts in the real-$s$ direction.
Such pole-zero filter cascades are efficient front ends for machine
hearing applications, such as music information retrieval, content
identification, speech recognition, and sound indexing.

Research Areas