Andrew King

I grew up in England near to Sheffield before studying a bachelor’s degree in psychology at the University of Hull (2006 – 2009). I then moved to Manchester, where I completed a master’s degree, by research, in acoustics at the University of Salford (2009 – 2011). After this, I completed a PhD studentship at the University of Manchester in the field of audiology (2011 – 2015). At the end of 2015, I moved to Paris to begin my post-doctoral position at l’école normale supérieure.

I am interested in how the processing of temporal properties of sounds might benefit hearing in challenging environments, such as following conversation in a noisy background. Currently I am studying how modulations in sound amplitude or frequency are detected, particularly in the presence of other modulations. My colleagues and I are comparing psychophysical thresholds of modulation detection, collected from people of various ages and levels hearing sensitivity, against thresholds estimated by computer models of auditory processing. During my PhD at the University of Manchester in the UK, I studied people’s sensitivity to the temporal cues in a sound that tell a listener which side of them the sound comes from. I studied how sensitivity to these cues differed for older and younger people, with and without hearing loss, and how this sensitivity might dictate how well a person understands speech in noisy backgrounds.