A Tour of the Auditory System Courtesy of Eric Young

Murray Sachs and Eric Young collected an amazing set of data from the auditory nerve of cats. They played vowel-like sounds to cats and recorded from a large number of auditory nerve fibers. The assembled data tells us a LOT about how the auditory system works. We recently lost Eric Young, as noted below. I’d like to use this Hearing Seminar to honor Eric and his data, and tell his story about how the auditory system works.

At this Friday’s Stanford Hearing Seminar I’ll give a tour of Eric's data, and talk about many of the effects that this data makes visible. This includes filtering, phase locking, transmission lines and temporal synchrony. There are innumerable models of the auditory system, but it’s more fun to see the effects we are trying to understand and model in the raw data. After all, everything we perceive must pass through the auditory nerve. What does the auditory nerve tell us about what we can hear? Time permitting I’ll also illustrate some of these ideas from the Correlogram Museum.

Who: Malcolm Slaney
What: A Tour of the Auditory System Courtesy of Eric Young
When: Friday February 23, 2024 at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room
Why: Eric and his data are amazing.

I hope you will join us to honor Prof. Eric Young and reflect on all the interesting ideas illuminated by his data.

- Malcolm

Papers to review:
https://doi.org/10.1121/1.383098
https://doi.org/10.1121/1.383532
https://doi.org/10.1121/1.392799
https://doi.org/10.1121/1.392800

Malcolm's presentation of the Eric Young Tour .


From: Malcolm Slaney malcolm at ccrma.Stanford.EDU
Wed Feb 7 07:58:01 PST 2024

My friend and mentor Prof. Eric Young passed away last weekend. The auditory world lost an amazing soul. He was smart, kind, and nurturing. I never had him for a class or wrote a paper with him, but he was certainly an inspiration. He grew up in Elko Nevada, built radios and escaped to Caltech, and spent his professional life at Johns Hopkins.

I first knew of his work because he published an amazing study titled:
Representation of steady‐state vowels in the temporal aspects of the discharge patterns of populations of auditory‐nerve fibers
  https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article-abstract/66/5/1381/778670/Representation-of-steady-state-vowels-in-the
This paper did a spectacular job showing how auditory nerves carried information about speech in both frequency (channel) and in time. In one multi-page figure he showed the firing rates over many pitch periods. I could spend a whole hour talking about all the different bits of information conveyed by the auditory nerve and that are visible in just one of Eric's figures.

Later I met him in person in Berkeley, as a guest of Prof. Erv Hafter, and a regular at the Berkeley Ear Club meetings (the Cal version of the Hearing Seminar). His quiet intellect, and knowledge of the inferior colliculus was inspiring. I have learned a lot from him, both about how the auditory system works and more importantly how to do science. We only got him down to Stanford for one talk.
  https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/eric-young-timing-in-auditory-system
Last winter over lunch outside in Berkeley it was delightful to hear Eric and Pam about their courtship during their college days.

His obituary is online at
https://www.eclipsefunerals.com/obituaries/eric-young
But omits many of his professional accomplishments. I hope we’ll have a better summary later.

The auditory research community is collaborative and supportive. And Eric Young was at the forefront of that effort. I appreciate all that he has done for me, and our community. I know his work will live on through his auditory papers. But I also hope he is remembered for his kindness, style, and intellect.

Thank you Eric for all you have done. I miss you.