ICRA Noises: Artificial Noise Signals with Speech-like Spectral and Temporal Properties for Hearing Instrument Assessment: Ruidos ICRA: Señates de ruido artificial con espectro similar al habla y propiedades temporales para pruebas de instrumentos auditivos

Dreschler, Wouter A.; Verschuure, Hans; Ludvigsen, Carl; Westermann, Soren Erik

doi:10.3109/00206090109073110

Cited by 286 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…This group must also be considered by those who wish to reach an audience including individuals over 60 years of age. [7] A series of realistic masking noises has been constructed and evaluated within the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA) [15] and distributed widely. The material contains nine noises with spectra shaped by the long-term average spectrum for male or female voices, with the individual talking in a normal, raised or loud voice.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hearing speech in music

Ekström¹,

Borg²

2011

Noise Health

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The masking effect of a piano composition, played at different speeds and in different octaves, on speech-perception thresholds was investigated in 15 normal-hearing and 14 moderately-hearing-impaired subjects. Running speech (just follow conversation, JFC) testing and use of hearing aids increased the everyday validity of the findings. A comparison was made with standard audiometric noises [International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA) noise and speech spectrum-filtered noise (SPN)]. All masking sounds, music or noise, were presented at the same equivalent sound level (50 dBA). The results showed a significant effect of piano performance speed and octave (P<.01). Low octave and fast tempo had the largest effect; and high octave and slow tempo, the smallest. Music had a lower masking effect than did ICRA noise with two or six speakers at normal vocal effort (P<.01) and SPN (P<.05). Subjects with hearing loss had higher masked thresholds than the normal-hearing subjects (P<.01), but there were smaller differences between masking conditions (P<.01). It is pointed out that music offers an interesting opportunity for studying masking under realistic conditions, where spectral and temporal features can be varied independently. The results have implications for composing music with vocal parts, designing acoustic environments and creating a balance between speech perception and privacy in social settings.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hearing speech in music

Ekström¹,

Borg²

2011

Noise Health

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“…Speech stimuli were combined with noise from the International Collegium for Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA) (Dreschler et al, 2001). The ICRA noise is an artificial signal with speech-like spectral properties and varying temporal modulations based on number of speakers.…”

Section: Noise Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of reverberation, background talker number, and compression release time on signal-to-noise ratio

Reinhart¹,

Zahorik²,

Souza³

2017

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Wide dynamic range compression (WDRC) processing in hearing aids alters the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a speech-in-noise signal. This effect depends on the modulations of the speech and noise, input SNR, and WDRC speed. The purpose of the present experiment was to examine the change in output SNR caused by the interaction between modulation characteristics and WDRC speed. Two modulation manipulations were examined: (1) reverberation and (2) variation in background talker number. Results indicated that fast-acting WDRC altered SNR more than slow-acting WDRC; however, reverberation reduced this difference. Additionally, less modulated maskers led to poorer output SNRs than modulated maskers.

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“…It is interesting for human ecology that the most extreme effects were seen with the modified ICRA noise (1,11). This noise, an International Organization for Standardization draft standard, was originally developed by audiologists to improve their assessment of hearing aid patients' ability to understand speech in noise and allow fair comparisons of performance regardless of the patient's native language.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The noise on this track is the sum of six streams of three-band Schroeder-phase speech (1,11). So that the ICRA noise covered a wider range of frequencies, a time-shifted version of the 5-to 20-kHz band was copied to the 20-to 35-kHz band by means of the Hilbert transform and added to the original noise.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Masking and scrambling in the auditory thalamus of awake rats by Gaussian and modulated noises

Martin

West

Bedenbaugh

2004

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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This paper provides a look at how modulated broad-band noises modulate the thalamic response evoked by brief probe sounds in the awake animal. We demonstrate that noise not only attenuates the response to probe sounds (masking) but also changes the temporal response pattern (scrambling). Two brief probe sounds, a Gaussian noise burst and a brief sinusoidal tone, were presented in silence and in three ongoing noises. The three noises were targeted at activating the auditory system in qualitatively distinct ways. Dynamic ripple noise, containing many random tone-like elements, is targeted at those parts of the auditory system that respond well to tones. International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology noise, comprised of the sum of several simultaneous streams of Schroeder-phase speech, is targeted at those parts of the auditory system that respond well to modulated sounds but lack a well defined response to tones. Gaussian noise is targeted at those parts of the auditory system that respond to acoustic energy regardless of modulation. All noises both attenuated and decreased the precise temporal repeatability of the onset response to probe sounds. In addition, the modulated noises induced contextspecific changes in the temporal pattern of the response to probe sounds. Scrambling of the temporal response pattern may be a direct neural correlate of the unfortunate experience of being able to hear, but not understand, speech sounds in noisy environments.T his paper examines how neurons in the auditory thalamus [medial geniculate body (MGB)] of awake rats respond to transient probe sounds in silence and in the presence of three ongoing noises. We demonstrate that noise changes not only probe response magnitude but also changes the temporal pattern of the probe-evoked response.The unwanted acoustic interference in natural listening situations is more closely modeled by modulated noise than by Gaussian, pink noise. This situation forces audiologists to employ complex noises, such as multispeaker ''babble,'' to predict the ability of hearing-aid users to comprehend speech in noisy environments. This study selected two complementary noises from the vast space of possible modulated noises. One noise was derived from a standardized babble noise developed by the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA) (1). The noise contains speech-like temporal modulations but without the narrow-band, tone-like elements of speech. Complementing the ICRA-derived noise is dynamic-ripple noise (DRN) (2), which was originally conceived as an aid to study responses of auditory neurons by the white-noise system identification approach (3). DRN presents many combinations of tone-like elements in a random order. Together, these noises should randomly stimulate parts of the auditory system that respond quite selectively to tones within a relatively narrow frequency range and parts of the auditory system that respond better to broad-band sounds.This study focused on the MGB because, in anesthetized animals, thalamic neurons res...

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ICRA Noises: Artificial Noise Signals with Speech-like Spectral and Temporal Properties for Hearing Instrument Assessment: Ruidos ICRA: Señates de ruido artificial con espectro similar al habla y propiedades temporales para pruebas de instrumentos auditivos

Cited by 286 publications

References 7 publications

Hearing speech in music

Hearing speech in music

Effects of reverberation, background talker number, and compression release time on signal-to-noise ratio

Masking and scrambling in the auditory thalamus of awake rats by Gaussian and modulated noises

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