Page 69 - Spring 2015

book Review
These reviews of books and other forms of information express the opinions of the individual reviewers and
are not necessarily endorsed by the Editorial Board of Acoustics Today or the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. – Philip L. Marston, Book Review Editor
Auditory Processing of
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affect each of these mechanisms are then expanded on, with a great selection of classic and modern references. Finally, the chapter closes with “a list of (seven) possible ways in which hearing loss and ageing might affect the neural en- coding of TFS.”
Chapters 2–5 that follow go on to explain the role of TFS in perception for both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. There are chapters on masking, pitch perception, speech perception, and binaural processing, and all share some similarity in structure. Each chapter explains the role of TFS in normal hearing in each case, and then explains how pathology associated with aging or hearing loss affects TFS processing, and subsequently the perceptual ability un- der review. This structure is somewhat dense but thorough, and does have the advantage of being predictable, so that the reader using the book as a reference can confidently move between chapters. Although the included figures in the middle chapters all clearly illustrate various results and data, some concepts that are explained in text might have been more easily conveyed via a simplified diagram.
The treatment of pitch perception in Chapter 3 covers both the pitch of simple sine waves as well as complex sounds. The chapter starts from the very basic elements of pitch per- ception. It is interesting to reconsider the old place pitch/ temporal pitch war within the ENV/TFS framework. Moore reviews a large literature demonstrating that for pure tones at low frequencies, TFS-N is the main factor contributing to pitch perception. At higher frequencies where there is no more phase locking, place pitch takes over. It would have been interesting to go deeper into other perceptual dimen- sions of pitch, such as spectral pitch, chroma, or brightness.
The final chapter is a useful overview of the book. It offers practical suggestions for how the ideas presented might be relevant for signal processing in hearing aids, as well as sug- gestions for how people might avoid the types of acoustic environments which are most detrimental for people who have low sensitivity to TFS.
The book has arrived at an interesting time in the worlds of hearing research and clinical audiology. As Professor Moore alludes to in his preface, there is an imperative for audiomet-
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Temporal Fine Structure:
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Effffects of Age and
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Hearing Loss
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Publisher: World Scientific
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ISBN: 978-981-4579-65-0
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Pages: 196 pp.
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Binding: Hardcover
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Publication Date: 2014
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Price: $85.00
Author: Brian C. J. Moore
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Review by:
Hamish Innes-Brown
Bionics Institute, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Jeremy Marozeau
Hearing Systems Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby 2800, Denmark
Auditory Processing of Temporal Fine Structure: Effects of Age and Hearing Loss is a comprehensive resource that will be of great use to readers with a variety of backgrounds and pur- poses. The structure is logical, the references are very up-to- date, and the index and table of contents are practical and useful.
At the core of the book is the concept that signals can be represented in terms of an envelope (ENV) superimposed on the temporal fine structure (TFS). Furthermore, ENV and TFS can be considered at three levels: the physical sig- nal itself (ENV-P and TFS-P), at a particular place on the basilar membrane or output of a cochlear filter (ENV-BM and TFS-BM), and in terms of neural representation (ENV- N and TFS-N).
The introductory chapter expands on these concepts com- prehensively. This chapter is the longest in the book, and in some ways is the most crucial. Cochlear filtering, hair cell transduction, and the “active amplifier” system of the co- chlea are all explained within the framework of ENV and TFS; at the levels of the physical signal, the pattern of vibra- tion of the basilar membrane, and neural encoding. The way in which various pathologies of hearing damage and aging
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