Neural representations of the pitch, timbre and source location of speech Event

The perceived qualities of sounds, such as the pitch or direction of a baby's cry, or the quality and type of a speech sound, are not so much external, objective properties of incoming sound waves, but rather "an interpretation" of the sounds, which stems from the neural processing of the auditory information. Much previous work has speculated about the existence of specialized pathways for the processing of either pitch or space or timbre, either in topographic maps or specialized streams. In this talk I will summarize recent work which questions this view and instead proposes a closely intertwined neural representation of the perceived features of real world sounds.