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The most important task perceptual systems absolve to is to recover what objects in the environment gave rise to the sensory stimulus. The auditory system is no exception to this: everyday we recognize not only speakers or musical instruments, but also cars approaching, leaves rustling, and glasses clinking.
In this talk, I will outline the research I carried out to understand what properties of the sound source are perceived and represented by cortical processes, and the role of acoustical structure in this process.
I will briefly describe a series of studies on: [1] the perception of sound-object materials; [2] on the modeling of acoustical structure for timbre perception; [3] on the role of acoustic and semantic information for the perceptual dissimilarity of environmental sounds.
I will finally describe in more detail a series of neuroimaging studies that aimed to understand: [1] the cortical anatomy for the processing of the identity of sound sources; [2] the encoding of time-varying acoustical structure in brain oscillations; [3] the representation of sound-category information in spatial fMRI patterns.