The Meddis MATLAB Auditory Periphery (MAP) model is a computational model of the mammalian auditory system made using MATLAB. The model simulates the physiological processes taking place at different stages within the auditory system and provides an insight on how a sound wave incident on the ear is modified as it passes through the auditory system. The stages of the auditory system included in the model are the middle ear, the inner ear and parts of the brain stem.
Calculating the response of each stage is a computationally intensive and time consuming task. It takes more than 7 minutes to just calculate the response of all auditory nerves, each producing an action potential about 300 times a second for a sound signal of 1 second duration when 1000 best frequencies are considered. This is a major disadvantage especially when the model has to be run multiple times in speech and hearing experiments.
The thesis describes how the runtime of the MAP model can be reduced by modifying the code, enabling it to run in parallel on multiple processing cores using tools provided by MATLAB. The thesis also describes how GPUs can be utilized to further reduce runtimes. The thesis concludes with an application of the MAP model in detecting differences between FM signals.