Scientific Article

A comparative study of eight human auditory models of monaural processing

¹ Laboratoire des systèmes perceptifs, Département d'études cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, CNRS, 75005 Paris, France
² Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14642, USA
³ Hearing Systems Section, Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
⁴ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON L8S 4K1, Canada
⁵ Hearing Technology group, WAVES, Department of Information Technology, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
⁶ Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1040 Vienna, Austria

^* Corresponding author: ale.a.osses@gmail.com

Received: 4 July 2021
Accepted: 28 February 2022

Abstract

A number of auditory models have been developed using diverging approaches, either physiological or perceptual, but they share comparable stages of signal processing, as they are inspired by the same constitutive parts of the auditory system. We compare eight monaural models that are openly accessible in the Auditory Modelling Toolbox. We discuss the considerations required to make the model outputs comparable to each other, as well as the results for the following model processing stages or their equivalents: Outer and middle ear, cochlear filter bank, inner hair cell, auditory nerve synapse, cochlear nucleus, and inferior colliculus. The discussion includes a list of recommendations for future applications of auditory models.