Brian Moore (scientist)

Moore studied Natural Sciences at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, obtaining his BA in 1968. In 1971 he was awarded a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology on the topic of Pitch Perception.[1]

Moore was a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Reading from 1971 to 1977, spending the year 1973-74 as a Fulbright-Hays Senior Scholar and Visiting Professor at the Department of Psychology, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. In 1977 he was appointed University Lecturer in Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge where he was subsequently appointed Reader (1989) and Professor (1995).[2] He became Emeritus Professor in 2014. He was appointed as Fellow of Wolfson College in 1983 and is now an Emeritus Fellow.[3]

Moore has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Auditory Neuroscience, Hearing Research, The International Journal of Audiology, Otology and Neuro-Otology, and Trends in Hearing. He was President of the Association of Independent Hearing Healthcare Professionals (UK) from 1994-2021.

Moore was one of the first researchers to present convincing evidence for the role of phase locking (the synchronization of nerve spikes to individual cycles of the filtered stimulus in the cochlea) in the perception of pitch. He showed that the ability of human listeners to detect small changes in frequency of brief tones was too good to be accounted for by a place mechanism of pitch for frequencies up to about 4 kHz.[9] Together with Stephan Ernst he later showed that the ability to detect small changes in frequency worsened with increasing frequency from 2 to 8 kHz, consistent with the roll-off in the precision of phase-locking information at high frequencies, and then reached a plateau, consistent with a transition to a place mechanism.[10] Together with Aleksander Sek he showed that phase locking to the temporal fine structure of complex tones contributes to the perception of pitch up to higher frequencies than previously assumed[11] and that the detection of frequency modulation for low modulation rates also probably depends on phase locking.[12]

Moore together with Brian Glasberg, Thomas Baer and Michael Stone developed a model for predicting the loudness of sounds[13] by extending and modifying the earlier models of Fletcher and Munson[14] and of Zwicker and Scharf.[15] The model proposed by Moore and co-workers formed the basis for an American National Standard[16] and an ISO standard.[5] An extension of the model to deal with time-varying sounds is under consideration as an ISO standard (ISO532-3, 2020). The loudness model of Moore and colleagues has been extended to predict loudness for people with hearing loss[17] and this has been used to develop methods of fitting hearing aids.[18]

Moore collaborated in the development and evaluation of multi-channel compression hearing aids intended to compensate for the loudness recruitment experienced by most hearing-impaired people.[19][20] He and his colleagues developed a dual-time-constant automatic gain control system that has been widely used in hearing aids and cochlear implants.[21][22]

Moore and colleagues developed the Threshold Equalizing Noise (TEN) test for diagnosing dead regions in the cochlea; these are regions with very few or no functioning inner hair cells, synapses or neurons.[23] The outcomes of the TEN test are relevant to the fitting of hearing aids and cochlear implants.[24][25] The TEN test has been incorporated in the audiometers of several major manufacturers. Brian Moore also contributed to the development of tests for assessing monaural and binaural sensitivity to the temporal fine structure of sounds.[26][27] These tests have been widely used in research and clinical studies.[28][29]

Moore and colleagues were among the first to demonstrate the role of harmonicity in auditory scene analysis: simultaneous sinewaves that form a harmonic series are heard as a single sound object, but if a single sinewave is mistuned slightly from the harmonic series it “pops out” as a separate sound object.[30][31] Moore and colleagues also showed that for rapid sequences of pure tones with alternating frequencies, the fission boundary (the frequency separation between successive tones at which they can no longer be heard as two separate streams) is constant across a wide range of centre frequencies when expressed on the ERB_N-number scale developed in Moore's laboratory.[32][33]

Moore and colleagues have conducted several studies examining the relationship between psychoacoustic abilities and speech perception by people with cochlear hearing loss and older people. They have shown that difficulties in speech perception are at least partly linked to reduced sensitivity to the temporal fine structure of sounds.[34][35][36] Deficits in the processing of temporal fine structure are associated with increasing age even when audiometric thresholds remain normal.[28]