This page has was last spruced July 11, 2002.

Ewan Macpherson emacpher@umich.edu Central Systems Laboratory Kresge Hearing Research Institute University of Michigan 1301 E. Ann St., Room 3036 Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0506 (734) 764-5167: Central Systems Laboratory, KHRI (734) 668-9399: My humble abode (734) 764-0014 What am I doing here? Research Interests and Projects Bio Stuff Somewhat Useful Software I've Written Other Things I Frequently Do

What am I doing here?

• I'm a post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Central Systems Laboratory at the Kresge Hearing Research Institute, University of Michigan.
• In May 1998 I completed my Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was a Cognitive and Perceptual Science grad student in the UW Psychology Department.
• While a grad student I was a research assistant at the Waisman Center's Hearing Development Research Lab, HDRL, directed by my advisor, Dr. Fred Wightman.

Research Interests & Projects

My main interest is in the mechanisms of sound localization, and in particular the processing of "pinna" or spectral cues. The aim is to understand how the auditory system generates a percept of a sound source situated in space from the signals reaching the eardrums. Or, as my mother puts it when explaining what I do: How do we hear in three dimensions when we have only two ears? I've done human psychophysics and computational modeling, and during my post-doc will be learning to do neurophysiology from Dr. John Middlebrooks.

Some publications, abstracts, posters, and reports are organized on my Research Page

Bio Stuff

Here is my C.V.: (updated July 2002)

• HTML (an ugly WordPerfect conversion)
• PDF (31 kB), (formatted for printing)

Education:

• 1 year of undergrad at Memorial University of Newfoundland
• B.Sc. in Engineering Physics, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario
• M.Sc. in Physics, University of Waterloo, (Audio Research Group)
• Ph.D. in Psychology, minor in Electrical Engineering, UW-Madison.
• Post-doc in the Central Systems Laboratory at the Kresge Hearing Research Institute, University of Michigan

This may not look too coherent, but it makes more sense than you'd expect. Honestly.

Somewhat Useful Software I've Written

• WAV file reading and writing in PV-Wave
  Here are two procedures, riff_read.pro and riff_write.pro, for making and reading .wav files in PV-Wave. Riff_read is just clever enough to skip extraneous data chunks that may be found in RIFF WAVE files.
• PipeLime. A Win95 tool for entering Highland bagpipe music into the Lime notation program.

Other Things I Frequently Do

• Explain where I'm from. See this poorly-labeled satellite photo to figure it out.
• Drink coffee, Mountain Dew, Jolt and other caffeine-rich wonder-beverages.
• Play the bagpipes. Check out my somewhat famous WWW Bagpipe Index and Hot Piping Stuff Page
• Listen to and play various other sorts of music. My tastes are eclectic, but not catholic. Among other things, I like gloomy British post-punk (i.e. The Cure), Javanese gamelan (which I studied for a year in Madison), and experimentalish electronic and so-called 'world' musics.
• Hold in high regard chinchillas, penguins, and cats..
• Wonder at the fact that my mother, father, and sister now have Web pages. Oh brave new world ... are you ready for the Four Dr. Macphersons of the Apocalypse?
• Add link after link to my Netscape Bookmark file. What can I say, I'm a lifelong packrat. And no, you can't look at it.
• Flog my dad's new book, A Day's March to Ruin, a documentary narrative of the Badenoch Men in the 'Forty-Five and biography of Col. Ewan Macpherson of Cluny, 1706-1764.

That's all!

Thanks for stopping by. Or, if you're from Newfoundland, 'Thanks for stopping, Bye!'