Ear Institute External Seminar: Ray Meddis - Computer Software for Modelling the Auditory Periphery and Brainstem

Emeritus Professor Ray Meddis, Essex University

1-1:30PM: Seminar, Ear Institute Main Seminar Room (Room G33)

1:30-3:30PM:  Optional Workshop, Ear Institute Skills Lab (Room B36)

UCL Ear Institute, 332 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1X 8EE

Does your research involve studying how the brain responds to sounds? Have you ever wondered how the auditory stimuli you use in your experiments might be represented across the auditory brainstem? This Friday 28th October, you have will have an opportunity to visualize simulated neural activity throughout the auditory periphery and brainstem, using a biologically realistic and biophysically detailed computer model developed by Professor Ray Meddis. If you would like to attend the workshop after the seminar, please bring a reasonably powerful laptop running Matlab 2014 or higher.

ABSTRACT: Computer models of the auditory periphery are useful tools for understanding auditory signal processing at a physiological level. Our ability to simulate auditory nerve firing patterns is now well developed but modelling of signal processing in the brainstem is largely restricted to small-scale efforts in a scattering of publications. This talk will present a MATLAB software platform that can be used to explore the brainstem response to sounds of interest to physiology and psychophysics researchers. By adopting a modular approach the software allows different cell types and their connections to be introduced, modified and studied in the context of their inter-cellular connections. The talk will begin with a general overview of what the software can do followed by a real-time demonstration of the model in action using a MacBook Pro laptop computer.  After the talk, there will be an opportunity to put the software on your own laptop to try the demonstrations with the author’s help. Extended support will then be available to people who want to incorporate similar modelling into their own research. If you are interested in joining this workshop to try the software for yourself, bring your laptop along and make sure that it is equipped with a recent version of MATLAB (2014+). Modelling is computationally intensive and it is important that machines should be reasonably well-specified for the most satisfying experience.