At the intersection of sound physics, auditory cognition, and interface design.
Chaos Hearing is a research project exploring how we hear, how sound behaves, and how we might build better tools for interacting with complex auditory environments. It sits at the crossroads of three threads:
- Physics of Sound — nonlinear dynamics, chaotic systems, physical modeling of sound synthesis, and probabilistic methods for audio analysis
- Cognition of Hearing — auditory scene analysis, musical imagery (hearing songs in your head), perfect pitch, and auditory phenomena in psychosis
- Interfaces for Interaction — intuitive audio control in multi-source environments, drawing from HCI and computational auditory scene analysis (CASA)
The project grew out of a thesis on Intuitive Audio Interaction and Control in Multi-Source Environments and a collaboration with Myunghyun Oh on the mathematics of hearing and chaotic dynamics.
chaoshearing/
├── README.md
├── index.md # GitHub Pages homepage
├── sources/ # Research papers and annotated bibliography
│ ├── BIBLIOGRAPHY.md
│ └── *.pdf
├── projects/
│ ├── 01-listening-and-duets.md
│ └── 02-spectral-cognition.md
├── notebooks/
│ └── nonstationary_audio.py
└── _config.yml
Hearing Performance, Chaotic Dynamics, and Computational Auditory Scene Analysis
The original thread: modeling the cochlea and auditory perception through the lens of nonlinear dynamics (Hopf bifurcations, limit cycles) and connecting that to how we parse complex sound scenes — duets, ensembles, overlapping conversations.
Sound Physics, Musical Imagery, and the Perception of Pitch
The newer thread: bridging the physics of sound (synthesis, physical modeling, probabilistic spectral analysis) with cognitive phenomena — perfect pitch, involuntary musical imagery, auditory hallucinations, and what these tell us about how the brain constructs sound.
A Python implementation exploring spectral mixture Gaussian processes for audio signal analysis — inspired by Wilkinson et al. (2019). See notebooks/nonstationary_audio.py.
See sources/BIBLIOGRAPHY.md for an annotated bibliography of the collected research papers.
MIT — Copyright (c) 2020 iiG