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how deficits in human hearing can be treated beyond the ear itself. One area that is likely to grow in the coming years involves the study of the efferent or top-down pathways. Al- though most introductory accounts of auditory processing concentrate on the pathway from the ear to the brain, there are at least as many, and probably more, pathways extend- ing from higher cortical levels down to brainstem structures and back to the ear itself. These pathways remain an under- explored but fascinating opportunity to understand how “higher level” processes, such as attention, expectation, and prior sound experiences, can shape how sound is processed as early as the ear itself.
Because of the clear health implications of hearing and its disorders, the National Institutes of Health, including the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communica- tion Disorders (NIDCD), have been the primary sources of research funding for work in the P&P area in the United States. The basic scientific interest in communication has led to support from the National Science Foundation over the years, and the ubiquitous role of acoustics at many levels of communication has led to interest and support from many defense-related agencies. Support in other countries has also been primarily through national funding agencies in medi- cine, science, and technology.
Members of P&P are active at all levels of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), forming a good proportion of the Society-wide award winners (including the 2014 Gold Medal winner, Brian C. J. Moore, and the R. Bruce Lindsay award winner, Matthew Goupell) as well as taking on lead- ership roles, with the 2014-2015 President Judy Dubno and Vice President Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, both active and long-standing members of the P&P TC.
There are obvious links between P&P and several other TCs as evidenced by the many joint and cosponsored ses- sions held at every ASA meeting. Most closely related are the TCs on speech, musical acoustics, animal bioacoustics, and noise. Understanding speech is, of course, a primary func- tion of human hearing and it is the main target of efforts to restore hearing via hearing aids and cochlear implants. A love of music is what attracts many researchers to the field of auditory perception in the first place, and the study of music perception in both normal, impaired, and electric hearing remains a topic of great scientific interest in the P&P com- munity. Of course, an interest in music is not something unique to P&P or even those in the committee on musical
acoustics; based on the talent on display at the regular jam sessions of the ASA, musical leanings are shared by mem- bers from all areas of the Society.
Biosketch
Andrew J. Oxenham is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Otolar- yngology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. After studying Music and Sound Recording (Tonmeister) at the University of Surrey, UK, he obtained
a PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge, UK. He worked at the Institute of Perception Research (IPO), Northeastern University, and MIT before going to Minnesota in 2006. He has authored over 150 ar- ticles and chapters and was the recipient of the Acoustical Society of America 2001 R. Bruce Lindsay Award and the National Academy of Sciences 2009 Troland Award. He cur- rently serves on the ASA Executive Council.
References
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