Invited talk "Hearing voices to communicate across the spectrum" by

Dr. Etienne Gaudrain,

Department of Otorhinolaryngology / Head and Neck Surgery,

University of Groningen / University Medical Center Groningen,

The Netherlands

will take place on Friday, April 5, 2019 from 13:00 to 14:30 hours in CBBM, Ground Floor, Seminar Room B1/B2.

Host: Prof. Dr. Jonas Obleser,
Auditive Cognition Group
Institute of Psychology I 
University of Lübeck


Abstract

At cocktail parties, a variety of listeners are communicating with a wide spectrum of speakers who have various anatomical properties, various accents, various emotional states... This variability is information that listeners exploit or strive to ignore, with more or less success depending on their hearing abilities. Here, we focused on the vocal characteristics of pitch and vocal-tract length (VTL) and studied how they are perceived and exploited to segregate competing talkers in listeners with normal-hearing or with cochlear-implants. Our findings suggest that there can be a disconnect between sensitivity to voice cues and ability to exploit these cues for voice segregation.