Modeling exercise

As part of the interview process, you must complete the following challenge.

Your task is to build a simple model of the cochlea. The model should include three stages:

  1. Basilar membrane (BM) – a bank of bandpass filters. The filter parameters should be chosen to match the filtering properties of the human cochlea.
  2. Inner hair cells (IHCs) – half-wave rectification of BM outputs followed by low-pass filtering. Again, the filter parameters should be chosen to match what is known about the human cochlea.
  3. Auditory nerve (AN) – Stochastic spike generation with IHC output providing the time-varying instantaneous spike probability.

Your model should take as input a sound waveform and produce as output AN spike times. Along with your model, you should also create a script or notebook demonstrating its function. You should use either Python or Matlab. You will be asked to present your solution to the challenge as part of your interview.

You may find this paper to be a useful starting point for references.