Title: The role of texture in auditory scene analysis Speaker: Jarrod Hicks Abstract:Everyday auditory scenes contain sounds from many sources. For example, when crossing the street, you might hear sounds produced from the rumble of passing cars, the chatter of pedestrians, and the rapid tick of crosswalk signals. To make sense of this complex mixture of sounds, the auditory system must separate the mixture into coherent perceptual representations that are likely to correspond to the underlying sources in the world. This process is known as auditory scene analysis. Although a rich body of work has probed auditory scene analysis with simple synthetic stimuli and revealed principles of perceptual organization, the extent to which these principles apply to real-world scenes with natural sounds remains unclear.This thesis empirically examines auditory scene analysis with realistic sounds. In particular, we study the perception of scenes containing a common class of environmental sounds known as “textures”, investigating how the auditory system makes use of statistical structure to separate textures from other sources and how the underlying statistical representation both constrains and enables scene analysis. We first investigated the mechanisms of hearing in noise using real-world background “noise” textures. The results show that the auditory system estimates the properties of “noise” textures and stores them over time, using the resulting internal model to estimate other concurrent sounds. We then considered how concurrent sound texture sources are separated from each other. We found that auditory scene analysis with textures involves some principles identified in classical scene analysis work with simple sounds, but that these principles apply to the higher-order statistical representations that define natural textures. Together, the results reveal new aspects of auditory scene analysis with real-world sounds and clarify the role texture plays in everyday hearing. Our findings provide a bridge between the simple, synthetic stimuli studied historically and the rich complexity of real-world sounds.Zoom Link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/97868598361?pwd=I5y3JhWyWSExh3SarlSpvVrBEvqRou.1

Ten minutes for your mind@2:50 every day at 2:50 pm in multiple time zones:Europa@2:50, EET, Athens, Helsinki (UTC+2) (7:50 am EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88298032734Atlantica@2:50, EST, New York, Toronto (UTC-4) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85349851047Pacifica@2:50, PST, Los Angeles, Vancouver (UTC=7) (5:50 pm EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85743543699Almost everything works better again if you unplug it for a bit, including your mind. Stop by and unplug. Get the benefits of mindfulness without the fuss.@2:50 meets at the same time every single day for ten minutes of quiet together.No pre-requisite, no registration needed.Visit the website to view all @2:50 time zones each day.at250.org or at250.mit.edu

“Genome Mining for New Natural Products and New Chemistry”webcast:https://web.mit.edu/webcast/chemistry/s25/1/

Join us on Monday, February 10, 2025, at 4pm in the Nexus, Hayden Library for a talk by Daniel Immerwahr, Humanities Professor at Northwestern University, on his upcoming book “This Too Shall Burn: America in the Age of Wood”.America has been, historically, a land of trees. This made its built environment thoroughgoingly wooden and, as a consequence, alarmingly combustible. In the same way that fossil fuels are today the source of our abundance but also the cause of a dreaded apocalypse, wood was the source of American abundance and the cause of constant, harrowing fires. In This Too Shall Burn, Daniel Immerwahr asks how those hair-raising fires have shaped—or scarred—the American past.Daniel Immerwahr is a historian at Northwestern University, where he is the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence. His most recent book, the award-winning How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, was a New York Times critics’ top book of 2019 and has been translated into seven languages. He is currently a 2024–2025 Radcliffe fellow performing research on this book.This jointly sponsored talk with STS, Anthropology, and History is free to the MIT community and to the public. We hope to see you there!

Christopher Walters University of California, Berkeley

Speaker: Ben Spitz (University of Virginia)Title: The Tambara Affine LineAbstract: In equivariant stable homotopy theory, objects called "Tambara functors" play the role of commutative rings. Tambara functors are abstract algebraic objects: they consist of sets with certain operations satisfying certain axioms; however, the theory of Tambara functors is much less developed than the theory of commutative rings, in part because it is not clear exactly how to define the "Tambara analogs" of many classical notions. Nonetheless, we expect that Tambara functors admit a theory of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, akin to the story for ordinary commutative rings. In this talk, I will discuss recent progress in developing such a theory for Tambara functors – in particular, we prove a version of the going-up theorem, which allows for the first computation of the "affine line" in Tambara algebraic geometry. This is joint work with David Chan, David Mehrle, J.D. Quigley, and Danika Van Niel.