Marc Schönwiesner
Biology / Auditory Neuroscience

I am an Assistant Professor at the BRAMS labs and the Psychology Department of the University of Montreal.

I study basic mechanisms of sound analysis in the human brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, and psychoacoustic tests.

Publications

Get list from PubMed »

Books:

Schröger, Kaernbach, Schönwiesner (2002) Nichtvisuelle Wahrnehmung. In: Lehrbuch Allgemeine Psychologie. Spektrum, Heidelberg, Germany »
Schönwiesner, M., 2004. Functional Mapping of Basic Acoustic Parameters in the Human Central Auditory System. MPI-Series in Cognitive Neuroscience, 53, Leipzig, Germany »

Current and Former Affiliations / Collaborations

International Laboratory for Brain, Music & Sound Research (BRAMS), Montreal, Canada »
MRC Institute for Hearing Research, Nottingham, UK »
Biomedical NMR Research GmbH, MPI for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany »
Cognitive Brain Research Unit, University of Helsinki, Finland »
AG Neurobiology, Institute for Biology II, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany »
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany »
Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland »
BioMag Laboratory, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Finland »
Institute for Medicine, Research Centre Jülich, Germany »

Grants

2009 - 2014 Discovery Grant (operating) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
2009 - 2010 Leaders Opportunity Grant (infrastructure) from the Canada Foundation for Innovation
2009 - 2010 Pilot Project Grant from the Quebec Bioimaging Network
2008 - 2013 Operating Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research together with Robert Zatorre
2006 - 2008 Research stipend from the Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, Germany
2005 Discipline Bridging Award from the University of Nottingham, UK (principal investigator: K. Krumbholz)
2005 Jeanne Timmins Costello Fellowship from the Montreal Neurological Institute, Canada
2005 Project grant from Defeating Deafness, UK (with K. Krumbholz)
2001 - 2004 PhD stipend from the German National Academic Foundation
2004 - 2005 visiting scientist fellowship from the Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Helsinki University
2003 Fellow of the Winter School in Neural Representations, Kitzbühl, Austria
2002 Travel Fellowship for the HBM conference in Japan from NIH & OHBM

Resources

a Matlab script to calculate the perceived loudness in sones of arbitrary sounds based on the loudness model by Moore and Glasberg [get file].
Several people had problems getting it running under the HUTear toolbox. I have now put all required scripts in a zip file. Just unpack at a location known to Matlab, and you are all set. On operating systems other than Windows you will need to mex ACbank.c and cgtbank.c. Thanks to Aki Hama for some scripts of the HUTear toolbox. The script is described in: Timoney, Lysaght, Schönwiesner, McManus (2004) Implementing Loudness Models in Matlab. International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx04), Naples, Italy [get PDF].
The script was used by people from Soitinrakentajat AmF and the Helsinki University of Technology in research to improve the Kantele, a traditional Finnish string instrument »
a Matlab script to generate Random Spectrogram Sounds. These stimuli can vary independently and parametrically in spectral and temporal sound complexity [get file].
Notes for my 2004 lecture on Sound Physics at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Helsinki University (3 pages):

Sound Features [ » ]

Wave Equation [ » ]

dB Scale [ » ]

Slides from my 2001 lectures on general brain theory (allgemeine Hirntheorie) in German for undergraduate and graduate biology, philosophy, and computer science students at the University of Leipzig, Germany (3 talks, slides in PDF format):

Teil 1: Neuronale Kodierung [ » ]

Teil 2: Corticonics [ » ]

Teil 3: Bewusstsein [ » ]

Some animations I made for a talk in a public series on perception from science to art. The talk was given by my PhD supervisor Dr. Rübsamen in Leipzig, Germany in 2001. The ear fly-though featured in the german TV science show 'Nano'. The animations are meant as illustrations, they are not correct in a scientific sense. I modeled all the geometry from illustrations in textbooks - today detailed 3D models made from MRI scans are available.

Outer, middle, and inner ear flythrough [ » ]

Cochlea unfolding, basilar membran vibration [ » ]

Illustration of sound arrival time difference from lateral source [ » ]

Some animations I made for my PhD defense talk at the University of Leipzig in 2004. They illustrate the development of the human central nervous system, the flow of sound information along the ascending auditory system, and some ideas about how functional lateralization emerges from subcortical routing.

From egg cell to organism with focus on the central nervous system [ » ]

Traveling along the ascending auditory pathway [ » ]

Illustration of topdown modulation [ » ]

Illustration of subcortical routing [ » ]

An illustration, made originally for my diploma thesis, that appeared (modified) in two books (Allgemeine Psychologie, Spektrum; and Art and the Brain Part III, a special issue of J Consciousness Stud) and in a review article (Johnsrude et al. (2002) Functional imaging of the auditory system: the use of positron emission tomography. Audiol Neurootol 7(5):251-76):

Location of Heschl's gyrus. Drawn during a brain dissection. [ » ]