Temporal Adaptation in a Silicon Auditory Nerve

Many auditory theorists consider the temporal adaptation of the auditory nerve a key aspect of speech coding in the auditory periphery. Experimentswith models of auditory localization and pitch perception also suggest temporal adaptation is an important element ofpractical auditory processing. I have designed, fabricated, and successfully tested an analog integrated circuit that models many aspects of auditory nerve response, including temporal adaptation. 1. INTRODUCTION We are modeling known and proposed auditory structures in the brain using analog VLSI circuits, with the goal of making contributions both to engineering practice andbiological understanding. Computational neuroscience involves modeling biology at many levels of abstraction. The first silicon auditory models were constructed ata fairly high level of abstraction (Lyon and Mead, 1988; Lazzaro and Mead, 1989ab; Mead et al., 1991; Lyon, 1991). The functional limitations of these silicon systems have prompted a new generation of auditory neural circuits designed at a lower level of abstraction (Watts et al., 1991; Liu et -al., 1991).