Nick Clark PhD
Visiting Fellow
Contact Details
Room 2.724
Department of Psychology
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ
U.K.
Tel: +44 (0)1206 - 874154
Fax: +44 (0)1206 - 874901
username nrclark add @essex.ac.uk for email address
BIOGRAPHY
My interests in music have inspired my fascination with audio and perception. I completed my first degree in Acoustics at the University of Salford, UK. Following this, I completed a PhD at the University of Nottingham, UK. This involved investigating perception of acoustical pitch information and using measured psychophysical data to revise computational models of pitch perception. Since 2010, I have been working at the University of Essex, Colchester, UK, under the leadership of Prof. Ray Meddis as part of the “Hearing Dummy” project.
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
We are currently working on a novel hearing aid that mimics the function of a healthy peripheral auditory system. I am involved in the continual development of the algorithm that performs the processing, as well as development of the real-time prototype that we currently use to test patients in the lab. I am also working on a novel method for fitting the hearing aid parameters to individuals. For this, the hearing aid algorithm is serially connected to a model of the impaired listener’s auditory periphery, the output of which is connected to an automatic speech recogniser. The hearing aid parameters can then be tuned to give the best automatic speech recognition performance in a range of adverse listening environments.
PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR Ray Meddis
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Clark, N.R., Brown, G., Jűrgens, T and Meddis, R. (2012) A frequency-selective feedback model of auditory efferent suppression and
its implications for the recognition of speech in noise, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 123, 1535–1541.
Brown, G.J., Jürgens, T., Meddis, R., Robertson, M., and Clark, N.R. (2011) “The representation of speech in a nonlinear auditory
model: time-domain analysis of simulated auditory-nerve firing patterns,“ Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the
International Speech Communication Association - Interspeech, Florence, Italy, pp. 2453–2456
Clark, N. R., Lecluyse, W., Meddis, R. (2011). “The contribution of peripheral efferent activity to the perception of speech innoise in
normal and impaired hearing” Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference and Experimental and Clinical Short Papers Meeting, British
Society of Audiology, Nottingham, UK
Clark, N. R., Krumbholz, K., Edmonds B.E., (2009), A Monaural Masking Release Based on Similar Mechanisms as Binaural
Unmasking, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Auditory and Audiological Research.
Balaguer-Ballester, E. Clark, N. R.,Coath, M., Krumbholz, K., Denham, S. L., (2009), Understanding Pitch Perception as a Hierarchical
Process with Top-Down Modulation, PLoS Comput Biol 5(3)
