New package “Brian hears” released

This week, Dan Goodman’s lab at Imperial College London released a new version of Brian hears. Brian hears, also called brian2hears, is a Python package for auditory modeling (documentation). It was originally a component of Brian, a more general scientific package for simulating spiking neural networks. While Brian’s feature set extended far beyond my own research interests and understanding of neural modeling, I used the ‘hears sub-package quite a bit as a postdoc, for both autodidactism and actual experimental work. A few years ago, Brian received a major update and became Brian 2, but ‘hears didn’t make the cut. Now, an updated version has appeared as a standalone package, although Brian 2 is a dependency.

I’m writing this because it changes my plans for The Cracked Bassoon slightly. So far I’ve written about sound synthesis in Python (actually, that’s all I’ve written about). Brian hears does exactly this, so I’m going to take a break from writing on this topic while I check it out. Dan is an excellent scientist and his lab produces fascinating work, so I’m bound to learn a few new things. I can’t wait to dive into the source code!

Version history

• Originally posted April 09, 2019.
• Added short title on March 27, 2020.

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• All posts filed under hearing, python.