Meeting Topic: Guided Tour of the Kresge Hearing Research Institute Central Systems Laboratory
Moderator Name: Dr. John Middlebrooks (jmidd-umich.edu)
Speaker Name: Dr. John Middlebrooks, Director, Central Systems Laboratory, Kresge Hearing Research Institute, The University of Michigan
Other business or activities at the meeting: N/A
Meeting Location: University of Michigan Medical Science Building I, Ann Arbor, MI
Dr. John Middlebrooks began the meeting by speaking about the areas of research currently being conducted at the Central Systems Laboratory, including spatial hearing and auditory prosthesis (cochlear implants). He then took the attendees on a guided tour of the facilities at the laboratory, featuring a hemianechoic chamber used for spatial hearing research experiments involving human subjects. The attendees were also shown a number of interesting spatial hearing-related demonstrations in the chamber, including one illustrating the difficulty of determining whether low-pass noise is being projected in front of or behind the subject, and one demonstrating a head-related transfer function-based localization system developed by the laboratory.