Roy D. Patterson, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, has been named recipient of the Acoustical Society of America’s Silver Medal in Psychological and Physiological Acoustics.
The Silver Medal is presented to individuals for contributions to the advancement of science, engineering, or human welfare through the application of acoustic principles, or through research accomplishments in acoustics.
Professor Patterson has been awarded the medal for contributions to understanding pitch and timbre perception, and for computational modeling of auditory representations.
“I am thrilled to have been awarded Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America. The list of previous medal holders is a list of my scientific heroes – people I have learned from and tried to emulate all my life. I only hope that some of my work will inspire the younger generation as they proceed with their auditory research,” said Patterson.
Patterson earned a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of California, San Diego. He held previous positions at the Defence and Civil Institute or Environmental Medicine in Toronto, Canada, the UK Medical Research Council, and as Head of the Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing at the University of Cambridge. After spending two years at the University of Plymouth, he returned to the University of Cambridge where he is now an auditory neuroscientist. He has spent his career trying to understand how the ear and the brain construct the perceptions, or auditory images, that we hear when presented with the sounds of speech and music. For example, when children and adults say the same words, the acoustic waves arriving at the ear are very different because of the difference in speaker size. Nevertheless, we hear the same speech message (the words). Speech recognition machines have great difficulty with this problem. The data from human listening experiments suggest that the ear and brain construct an internal representation of the speech that is the same for people of all sizes.
Patterson and his colleagues have developed a mathematical transform to show how the cochlea and auditory neurons could make such a representation, and how the representation could assist in attempts to produce better speech recognition machines.
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics.