By Charlene N. Rivera-Bonet | Waisman Science Writer
Bobby Gibbs, PhD, is a music composer turned researcher whose deep interest and expertise in sound perception led him to the Waisman Center. The new assistant professor in communication sciences and disorders is establishing his research lab to study how strategies for optimizing acoustic information are affected by differences in the way neurons represent auditory information, such as neural degeneration and cochlear implants usage.
Gibbs’s background is originally in music composition. He plays the clarinet and uses the piano as his main composition tool. From there, he became interested in acoustics, particularly psychoacoustics, which studies the combination of the physical properties of a sound and how humans perceive it. He obtained his doctoral degree in architectural acoustics with an emphasis on spatial hearing at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
“I wanted to learn more about the auditory system and how it deals with degraded information, and that led me to cochlear implant research. It’s the perfect window into how the auditory system deals with degraded input,” Gibbs says. A degraded auditory input can happen because of background noise, poor room acoustics, and hearing loss, among other reasons.
He then went on to obtain two postdoctoral experiences studying different aspects of degraded auditory inputs. During the first, from the University of South Carolina, he focused on how the auditory system uses different cues to recognize speech depending on the background noise. Part of this work was conducted with simulations of cochlear implant processing called vocoders. That naturally led into his second postdoc opportunity at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he brought together genetics, electrophysiology and psychophysical properties to explain variability in the brain’s ability to process rapid, successive stimuli, and acoustic cue utilization in cochlear implant listeners.
Researchers at the Waisman Center started noticing Gibbs’s work when he presented at different conferences and recruited him to come. “When this opportunity arose, I jumped at it because I knew what the infrastructure here looked like and how successful my research program can be here,” Gibbs says. “Ever since I changed fields, from music to acoustics, research has been my passion, and this is my first chance to be at the helm of my own research lab,” he adds.
His current research focus aims to guide strategies for enhancing auditory signals in cochlear implant recipients and older adults. When someone with typical hearing is presented with complex hearing tasks such as speech and noise, there are cues they can use to be successful even when the full signal isn’t available. “We don’t know what cues are important for these complex tasks when someone has alternate encoding, as is the case with cochlear implant listeners,” Gibbs explains. “That alternate neural encoding is different for different listeners, and getting that mapping can change how we approach signal enhancement and rehabilitation.”
Gibbs incorporates multiple techniques to be able to study this. He uses electrophysiology to characterize the preservation of the auditory nerve. He also uses behavioral measures, which are carefully designed stimuli that interrogates the cues that people are using when presented with complex hearing tasks. “Combining those two things enables me to find out which areas of the speech spectrum would be appropriate for enhancement and how that relates to particular degeneration profiles,” Gibbs says.
For Gibbs, the infrastructure of the Waisman Center gets him excited to work here. It has an already- established population of people who come to the center for cochlear implant research, and a group of researchers in the field he can work with. “When we partner together it’s like a synergy type effect, and we could learn more than either of us could working in a siloed way,” Gibbs says.
In addition to music and acoustics research, Gibbs also enjoys fencing and biking to work and around Madison.
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