Gammatone filter banks model human auditory filtering using measured nerve responses

Evidence

The gammatone filter bank (Patterson, 1994) is the most commonly used method to emulate the frequency resolution of hearing. The physiological basis for such filters originates from the so-called reverse correlation technique measurements (De Boer, 1969) that yield an estimate of the impulse response of the auditory nerve fibre. Since this estimate resembles the shape of a pure tone that has been modulated with a gamma function, the corresponding filter is known as a gammatone filter. In addition, the frequency response of a gammatone filter is very similar to the human auditory filter as estimated by psychoacoustic notched-noise measurements (Glasberg and Moore, 1990). The popularity of the gammatone filter bank is also influenced by its computational efficiency and the relatively simple design. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1611

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains what a gammatone filter is and why its shape results from measured auditory nerve impulse responses.
• XREF: Directly relevant to models of speech and hearing used across the reader’s acoustic-communication corpus; addresses the mechanism question of how auditory nerve data becomes a computational filter.