I've recently returned from a fantastic workshop in Leipzig, Germany: Signal and Noise along the Auditory Pathway (SNAP). SNAP2013 was held at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, organized by Jonas Obleser (with much help from his lab and many others).
Every talk was excellent and I won't go through them one by one; it's worth looking at the program for a list of speakers. The goal was to bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers working on how the brain processes auditory signals, drawing from computational modeling, animal work, psychophysics, and cognitive psychology. A common theme that emerged was the importance of prediction in sensory processing, with a number of complementary views on how the brain accomplishes this.
There are already talks about a repeat conference in 2-3 years, perhaps in North America. I'm hopeful we'll have another chance for such a great meeting!
Oh, and for those of you who might not have caught the reference (you would be forgiven), Snap! is also a Europop group from the early 1990s, and there was a friendly competition to see who could work in the best reference to Snap! in his or her SNAP talk.
Snap music video for "Rhythm is a dancer"