You can see a lot of things at the same time. In fact, the visual field is made up of hundreds of thousands of small segments that come together as a whole. Attention can be focused on a particular detail, but the parts of the whole are not in rivalry. They coexist in space. For sound, on the contrary, part of the acoustic field masks the rest. The closest visual equivalent would be glare. A line of light erases everything else.
John Hull, Touching the rock: An Experience of Blindness (1990)

John Hull became blind in 1983 in his fifties, and wrote a touching and fascinating autobiographical account of blindness. He highlights specific features inherent to hearing, such as the superposition or even destructive interactions between several sound sources (in the above quote), or the fact that acoustic space is imposed on us: we can't turn away our ears  from a distracting sound, but instead we have to pay attention to a sound over another one, possibly learn to distinguish one sound from another, to form memory templates of important sounds.

In that context, we seek for the neural basis of auditory cognition. Our goal is to understand how how contextual factors interact intimately with auditory processing at the cortical level. We tackle this problem from different conceptual angles detailed below. We use two main types of neural recording techniques, both focusing on the mesoscopic scale: electrophysiological recordings of population of neurons, and large-scale functional UltraSound (fUS) neuroimaging.