ABSTRACT
The percept of pitch is one of the primary characterizations of sound that Dr. Deroche has investigated from a number of different approaches spanning musical acoustics, speech psychoacoustics, audio engineering, and cognitive neuroscience. He has a particular interest in severe hearing loss and the existing technologies to circumvent them, typically cochlear implants. Those devices deliver good speech information but poor voice pitch cues, leading to a cascade of auditory, cognitive, affective, and psychosocial consequences. This presentation will review how different neurophysiological techniques (EEG, fNIRS, tDCS, pupillometry) can help understand and eventually solve some of the symptoms of auditory dysfunctions, an area of research that is broad and welcoming to collaborations with members of the CIRMMT community.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Deroche is interested in hearing and cognition, using behavioral and neurophysiological techniques. He is originally from France, coming from an engineering background in acoustics with a strong interest in music and speech. In 2009, he completed his PhD in Cardiff University with John Culling, studying the use of pitch in cocktail-party situations. From 2010 to 2015, he worked with Monita Chatterjee at the University of Maryland and Charles Limb at Johns Hopkins, documenting the challenges that users of cochlear implants face with pitch perception and how they translate into further deficits in music and language. Since 2015, he worked in different institutions and centers, including CIRMMT, on a number of projects spanning auditory masking, emotion processing, sensorimotor integration, cognitive load and short-term memory in listeners with impoverished hearing as well as other populations of interest (musicianship, stuttering, Parkinson’s disease).