A biomimetic basis for the perception of natural sounds

Abstract

Arrays of subwavelength resonators can mimic the biomechanical properties of the cochlea, at the same scale. We derive, from first principles, a modal time-domain expansion for the scattered pressure field due to such a structure and propose that these modes should form the basis of a signal processing architecture. We investigate the properties of such an approach and show that higher-order gammatone filters appear by cascading. Further, we propose an approach for extracting meaningful global properties from the coefficients, tailored to the statistical properties of so-called natural sounds.