Introduction
Roy Patterson (born in Boston, MA) is a British auditory scientist, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience of the University of Cambridge. Patterson is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, from which he received the Silver Medal in Psychological and Physiological Acoustics in 2015.
Biography
After studying Chemical Engineering and Experimental Psychology at the University of Toronto, Patterson pursued a PhD at the University of California at San Diego, in David M. Green's lab. The objective of his work was to extend the concept of critical bands introduced by Harvey Fletcher to propose a mathematical model of auditory filters.
After his PhD, Patterson moved to Canada where he was employed by the Defence and Civil Institute of Environmental Medicine. He used the auditory models developed during his doctoral studies to improve auditory warnings in various Canadian aircraft. He movedin 1975 to the Applied Psychology Unit of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK, Patterson continued his work on auditory warnings, including the preparation of guidelines for auditory warning systems on civil aircraft during a stay at the Institute for Perception Research, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. This work found applications by the Royal Air Force, the Civil Aviation Authority, British Rail, the London Fire Brigade and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committee on hospital warnings.
In 1990, Patterson, returning to his work on auditory modelling, developed a new dynamic modelcreating a visual representation of the neural activity resulting from an auditory stimulus: the Auditory Image Model (AIM).
Patterson moved in 1997 from the APU, then rebranded CBSU, to the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience of the University of Cambridge, where he founded the Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing (CNBH). The CNBH was a multi-university lab, with a second centre at the University of Essex directed by Ray Meddis. From 2013 to 2015, Patterson worked at the University of Plymouth as Professor of Psychology. Patterson remained the head of the CNBH until 2015.
At the CNBH, Patterson, together with Toshio Irino, develop an optimal Gammachirp filter thatcould explain why auditory perception is so robust to variation in source size. Patterson and Irino then build a version of the auditory image that is "scale-shift invariant", i.e. where sounds produced by sources of different sizes (e.g. syllables uttered by adults and children) have the same representation, except for a translation.