Roy Dunbar Patterson is an auditory neuroscientist in the Department of Physiology, Development, and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.

[4] This work found applications by the Royal Air Force, the Civil Aviation Authority, British Rail, the London Fire Brigade and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committee on hospital warnings.

[5][6] Patterson moved in 1997 from the APU, then rebranded CBSU, to the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience of the University of Cambridge, where he and Ian Winter founded the Centre for the Neural Basis of Hearing (CNBH).

[8] At the CNBH, Patterson, together with Toshio Irino, developed an optimal "gammachirp" filter that could explain why auditory perception is so robust to variation in source size.

[9][10] Patterson and Irino then build a version of the auditory image that is "scale-shift invariant", i.e. where sounds produced by sources of different sizes (e.g. syllables uttered by adults and children) have the same representation, except for a translation.