Evaluation of Loudspeaker-Based Virtual Sound Environments for Testing Directional Hearing Aids

Abstract

It can be concluded that the considered VSEs can be used for testing directional HAs, but the provided sensitivity is reduced when compared to a real environment. This can result in an underestimation of the provided directional benefit. However, this minor limitation may be easily outweighed by the high realism of the acoustic scenes that these VSEs can generate, which may result in HA outcome measures with a significantly higher ecological relevance than provided by measures commonly performed in the laboratory or clinic.

An Extended Binaural Real-Time Auralization System With an Interface to Research Hearing Aids for Experiments on Subjects With Hearing Loss

“…Possible measures for quantifying the sound field error between synthesized and reference sound fields include, among others, the analysis of room acoustic parameters such as reverberation times EDT and T 30 or clarity indices like C 50 and C 80 , long-term power spectral density of the HA microphone signals, binaural parameters such as (mean) interaural time and level differences, interaural cross correlation coefficient, and the improvement in signal-to-noise ratio using multichannel HA algorithms (cf. Cubick & Dau, 2016 ; Grimm, Ewert, et al., 2015 ; Oreinos & Buchholz, 2014 , 2016 ). For perceptual system evaluations, a road map to assess spatial sound perception was proposed by Nicol et al.…”

“…Traditionally, reproduction of such VAEs relies on headphones (HPs), which restricts applications for HA users owing to feedback issues and uncontrolled behavior of HA algorithms. However, auralization systems reproducing VAEs are also capable of handling playback via LS set-ups through various technologies and have already demonstrated their suitability for the use in HA research ( Grimm, Ewert, et al., 2015 ; Minnaar et al., 2013 ; Mueller, Kegel, Schimmel, Dillier, & Hofbauer, 2012 ; Oreinos & Buchholz, 2016 ). Regardless of the chosen LS-based reproduction technique, issues related to a proper integration of HAs into the VAE need to be resolved.…”

The Effect of Hearing Loss on Localization of Amplitude-Panned and Physical Sources

“…16,17 It is also the expected scenario for use of this technique in a clinical context. [25][26][27][28] For these reasons, free head movement was deemed to be an acceptable experimental choice in the present study.…”

Measuring communication difficulty through effortful speech production during conversation

“…No silent condition was included as the noise level of the library environment was considered low enough to act as a baseline. All environments were recorded using a purpose-built, 62-channel spherical microphone array (Oreinos & Buchholz, 2016). These environments form a subset of a library of realistic spatial recordings developed at the National Acoustic Laboratories, and were selected because they represented a range of complexities characteristic of common everyday settings.…”