Citizens' Campus: Hearing and understanding: How our brain gives meaning to sound

Our hearing is not just a sensor that assigns a clear value or meaning to every change in sound pressure, but rather a complex system that is not yet fully understood. This system is based to a large extent on pattern recognition, interactions between the senses and a comparison with our own expectations.

The lecture provides an overview of the mechanisms of hearing and underpins these with audio examples and analogies from everyday life. How does directional hearing work? What is the cocktail party effect? Why do we spend a lifetime learning to hear? What does all this actually have to do with technology? These are just some of the questions that will be answered in the lecture.

Speaker Dr. Florian Klein has been researching the field of human auditory perception for more than 15 years and focused on the learning ability of our hearing in his dissertation. Dr. Klein currently works at the TU Ilmenau and the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology. He thus works at the interface between auditory perception and the development of future audio technologies.

Admission: 5 euros