Abstract
Octopus cells in the posteroventral cochlear nucleus exhibit characteristic onset responses to broad band transients but are little investigated in response to more complex sound stimuli. In this paper, we propose a phenomenological, but biophysically motivated, modeling approach that allows to simulate responses of large populations of octopus cells to arbitrary sound pressure waves. The model depends on only few parameters and reproduces basic physiological characteristics like onset firing and phase locking to amplitude modulations. Simulated responses to speech stimuli suggest that octopus cells are particularly sensitive to high-frequency transients in natural sounds and their sustained firing to phonemes provides a population code for sound level.