Laback, Doz. Dr. Bernhard

Biography

Bernhard Laback first studied natural-sciences oriented (systematic) musicology with a focus on psychoacoustics at University of Vienna. In 2004 he graduated with his thesis: ‘The influence of the strings' spectrum on the radiated sound of the violin’. In parallel he studied sound engineering at the Institute of Electroacoustics and Electronic Music (Univ. of Music and Applied Arts, Vienna) which he completed successfully with Diploma in 2004. He then worked on his interdisciplinary PhD thesis at the University of Vienna, the Free University Hospital Amsterdam, and the Medical University of Vienna, titled "Music perception with sensorineural hearing impairment and applications for signal processing algorithms in hearing aids". He defended the thesis in 1999.  Bernhard Laback received the DOC (doctoral) grant of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for his PhD work. Within the course of the PhD he worked at the Experimental Audiology Group of the Free University Medical Center, Amsterdam, local advisor: Dr. Niek Versfeld), which allowed him to enter the research field of hearing impairment.  Back in Vienna, he started working at Acoustics Research Institute (ARI) in 1999. He built up a working group focusing on psychophysical studies with cochlear implant (CI), normal hearing (NH), and hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. In 2011 Bernhard Laback was elected as Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies (Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, HWK) in Delmenhorst, Germany. During a nine-month fellowship in 2012 he cooperated with the University of Oldenburg, Medical Physics Department (Prof. Birger Kollmeier).  In 2013 Bernhard Laback habilitated in General or Experimental Psychology at the University of Vienna

Research Interest

Bernhard Laback is interested in various aspects of human auditory perception. One particular focus of his work is on perceptual deficits of listeners supplied with cochlear implants (CIs). He compares auditory performance between CI, NH, and partly also HI listeners, with the goals of (1) describing the nature of the perceptual deficit, (2) devising methods to compensate for perceptual deficits by means of hearing devices, and (3) developing and informing models of the normal auditory system. A focus of his work is on spatial hearing, both in the horizontal and vertical dimensions. The follwing highlights some of the projects: In the Austrian-Science Fund (FWF) funded project CI-HRTF he and his colleagues studies the feasibility of localizing in vertical planes with CIs.  In the internally funded project ITD Jitter he and his colleagues found that introducing interaurally coherent jitter in the stimulation timing enhances the sensitivity to interaural time differences (ITDs). This research resulted in a publication in PNAS and an international patent.  In the NIH-funded project ITD PsyPhy, a cooperation with the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (Harvard Medical School, Boston), physiological studies in rabbits (PI: Bertrand Delgutte) are combined with human psychophysical studies (our lab) to explore new approaches for enhancing ITD cues in CI stimulation. Inspired by our jitter studies and subsequent physiological studies of the Boston group, we introduce short inter-stimulus intervals to enhance ITD cues at selected instances of amplitude modulated sounds.