When we walk into a crowded room, it takes us a moment to be able to hear clearly the voice of our partner against a noisy background. Yet it is an astonishing feat of our auditory system that we are able to do it at all, as the machines that we try to build to perform such a computation do not match our performance. How does the brain transform the time-varying sound pressure into a sound percept and attribute it to a specific source? How does it discard unnecessary information about the background?

Our goal is to understand processing of complex sounds at the level of multi-neuronal assemblies. We study how ensembles of neurons communicate to encode information about natural sounds, and how this coding is shaped by our behavior and experience.

We combine a variety of techniques across disciplines:

1. -statistical analysis of natural auditory scenes
   

2. -recording and analysis of responses of multi-neuronal ensembles in the auditory cortex of rodents
   

3. -rodent behavioral studies
   

4. -optogenetic methods
   

5. -psychophysical experiments with human subjects