http://auditorymodels.org/jba Dr. Jonathan (Jont) B. Allen received a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1966, and MS and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 and 1970 respectively. After graduation in 1970 Allen joined Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill NJ, where he was in the Acoustics Research Department (from 1974 to 1997), as a Distinguished member of Technical Staff. Since 1997 he is with the research division of the newly created AT&T Labs.

	Where I work
Biographical Info. Bibliography (in different formats): postscript, HTML, bibtex, ENDNOTE  Patents: postscript, HTML
	Drawing of the Cochlear Duct

VIDEO: (You will need the RealAudio video player. Download RealAudio player)

1. Video talk of me describing my theory of the cochlea (May 19, 1998):

   Title: 'Derecruitment by Multiband compression in hearing aids'

   An MPEG version of this talk may be found in:
   The Efferent Auditory System ; Ed. C. Berlin,
   Chapt. 4., pp 73--86, Singular, 1999,
   401 West A St., Suite 325, San Diego, CA 92101

   Click here to watch the cochlear model video

   ---

2. Video of Harvey Fletcher being interviewed by Bruce Bogert at Bell Labs (circa 1963).

   This material is discussed in:
   Harvey Fletcher's role in the creation of communication acoustics
   J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 1996, April, Vol. 99, pp 1825--1839.

   This 28 minute video proceeds as follows:

   1. Introduction (00:06)
   2. Short story about coyote (00:32)
   3. Millikan and the Oil drop experiment (01:35)
   4. Acoustics (7:49)
   5. Audiometry and Alfred DuPont's desk size $5000 hearing aid (9:27)
   6. Stereo, orthotelephonic response, and phonograph (11:20)
   7. Three channel sound presentation (14:15)
   8. Three channel sound on film (18:20)
   9. The critical band theory and loudness (19:15)
   10. Musical acoustics and the inharmonic structure of a Piano (22:45)
   11. Retirement (25:54)
   12. Final words and credits (27:30)

   Click here to watch Fletcher video

Selected papers:

1. Talk at ARO 1999 in html or postscript

   Title: An analysis of the basal basilar membrane response to tones

   This paper shows that the slope in the basal tail for long-wave cochlear models is 3 dB/mm, whereas neural data have a slope of 0.2 dB/mm. This very shallow slope is consistent with two-tone suppression and upward-spread of masking thresholds, which are independent of masker frequency (Fahey and Allen, JASA 1985, pp 599-612).

2. AES97_talk.ps (postscript)

   This is modified version of Sept. 28 AES talk, with the material somewhat better organized. The title of the talk was A short history of telephone psychophysics A 37 page preprint (# 4636) may be ordered from the AES society. I think they costs $4. The talk summarizes the most basic Bell Labs and Harvard findings about masking and loudness and psychophysics between 1915 (when the vacuum tube was invented) and circa 1950.

3. JND.ps (zip format):

   This paper appears in the Dec 1997 issue of JASA. I have downloaded this copy from the JASA website. If you wish to have it in another format, go to ASA website and search for "Allen" or page 3628. Note: you will need a login (i.e., you must be an ASA member) to access the ASA website journal pages.

   This paper discusses the relation between loudness and the intensity JND. We have shown that intensity discrimination may be viewed as the second moment of the loudness decision variable, and that this decision variable is Poisson. These results are consistent with the JND being due to internal (neural) noise.

4. ASA-S96.ps, ASA-S96.pdf:

   This paper was presented at a special session of the INDY spring meeting of the ASA in 1997. The paper reviews the definitions of "active" and "passive" as applied to cochlear mechanics, and shows that the cochlea must be active, because it contains a battery. It then goes on to discuss the role of the outer hair cells in hearing. Finally the paper discusses the role of the "cochlear amplifier." It concludes that the cochlea is a low-loss high-delay system.

5. ARO97.ps, zipped version of ARO97.pdf:

   You must use the Orientation/Swap Landscape option in Ghostview to fix the orientation of this set of figures.

   This paper was present orally at the ARO meeting in Feb. 1997. It discusses why the outer hair cells (OHC) are need by the auditory system to compress the dynamic range of the acoustic signal due to the limited dynamic range of the inner hair cell (IHC). According to this theory, the OHCs tension the basilar membrane, thereby changing its stiffness as a function of signal intensity (Page 9). When the stiffness changes, the basilar membrane cutoff frequency changes accordingly. The gain seen by the IHC is dynamically controlled by sliding the low-pass filter of the cochlear traveling wave across the high pass filtering of the tectorial membrane, which varies the gain at the cross-over frequency. This idea can be used to explain the upward-spread of masking (Page 8).

6. aro_95.ps :

   This was a talk at the ARO meeting in 1995 on SFOAEs and power flow in the cochlea. We concluded that there is no evidence, based on ear canal impedance measurements, for a cochlear amplifier.

7. filterh.zip:

   This zip file contains a matlab "mat" file with 60 human cochlear filters computed from a model of the cochlea. To view them, down load the file and unzip it. Then from matlab give the commands:

   load FILTERH.MAT
   loglog(abs(Hw))
   zoom

   Then use the mouse to select the viewable portion from the screen, to scale the frequency range of interest. If you wish to plot the data as a function of place along the basilar membrane, use the command:

   semilogy(abs(Hw)')

   and again use zoom to display the region of interest.