The Influence of Interaural Phase on Interaural Summation and Inhibition

Hirsh, Ira J.

doi:10.1121/1.1916992

Cited by 123 publications

(161 citation statements)

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“…Hofman et al (1998) required NH listeners to listen through modified pinnae, which altered the mapping between the filtered waveform reaching the inner ear and source location, for a period of up to six weeks. Subsequently, subjects were sensitive to location cues based on both the new and the old maps.…”

Section: High-rate Limitations On Binaural Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It can also provide a basis for speech identification (Akeroyd and Summerfield 2000;Culling and Colburn 2000) and provides about half the benefit NH users obtain from listening through two ears (Zurek 1993). The standard measure of this [binaural masking level difference (BMLD)] is the threshold difference between the case where both the masker and signal are identical at the two ears and the one where the signal is inverted at one ear (Hirsh 1948).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Binaural Unmasking with Bilateral Cochlear Implants

Long

Carlyon

Litovsky

et al. 2006

JARO

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Nearly 100,000 deaf patients worldwide have had their hearing restored by a cochlear implant (CI) fitted to one ear. However, although many patients understand speech well in quiet, even the most successful experience difficulty in noisy situations. In contrast, normalhearing (NH) listeners achieve improved speech understanding in noise by processing the differences between the waveforms reaching the two ears. Here we show that a form of binaural processing can be achieved by patients fitted with an implant in each ear, leading to substantial improvements in signal detection in the presence of competing sounds. The stimulus in each ear consisted of a narrowband noise masker, to which a tonal signal was sometimes added; this mixture was half-wave rectified, lowpass-filtered, and then used to modulate a 1000-pps biphasic pulse train. All four CI users tested showed significantly better signal detection when the signal was presented out of phase at the two ears than when it was in phase. This advantage occurred even though subjects only received information about the slowly varying sound envelope to be presented, contrary to previous reports that waveform fine structure dominates binaural processing. If this advantage generalizes to multichannel situations, it would demonstrate that envelope-based CI speech-processing strategies may allow patients to exploit binaural unmasking in order to improve speech understanding in noise. Furthermore, because the tested patients had been deprived of binaural hearing for eight or more years, our results show that some sensitivity to time-varying interaural cues can persist over extended periods of binaural deprivation.

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Section: High-rate Limitations On Binaural Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Binaural Unmasking with Bilateral Cochlear Implants

Long

Carlyon

Litovsky

et al. 2006

JARO

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“…Should a BMLD-like effect indeed act at the level of small spectrotemporal regions, then deletion of target speech from spectro-temporal regions with local SNR values between − 15 and 0 dB (i.e. between dichotic and diotic masked thresholds, Hirsh (1948)), should degrade speech intelligibility for separated, but not for collocated sources, since those speech components would be inaudible in a collocated configuration anyway. This implies that over this same range of SNR criteria the spatial release from masking, as measured by the difference in performance between separated and collocated source configurations, should decrease.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intelligibility for Binaural Speech with Discarded Low-SNR Speech Components

Schoenmaker

Par

2016

Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology

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Speech intelligibility in multitalker settings improves when the target speaker is spatially separated from the interfering speakers. A factor that may contribute to this improvement is the improved detectability of target-speech components due to binaural interaction in analogy to the Binaural Masking Level Difference (BMLD). This would allow listeners to hear target speech components within specific time-frequency intervals that have a negative SNR, similar to the improvement in the detectability of a tone in noise when these contain disparate interaural difference cues. To investigate whether these negative-SNR target-speech components indeed contribute to speech intelligibility, a stimulus manipulation was performed where all target components were removed when local SNRs were smaller than a certain criterion value. It can be expected that for sufficiently high criterion values target speech components will be removed that do contribute to speech intelligibility. For spatially separated speakers, assuming that a BMLD-like detection advantage contributes to intelligibility, degradation in intelligibility is expected already at criterion values below 0 dB SNR. However, for collocated speakers it is expected that higher criterion values can be applied without impairing speech intelligibility. Results show that degradation of intelligibility for separated speakers is only seen for criterion values of 0 dB and above, indicating a negligible contribution of a BMLD-like detection advantage in multitalker settings. These results show that the spatial benefit is related to a spatial separation of speech components at positive local SNRs rather than to a BMLD-like detection improvement for speech components at negative local SNRs.

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“…Normally hearing people can detect a change in interaural time difference as small as 10 microseconds (16,85). Second, when a desired signal and a background noise come from different locations, comparison of the stimuli reaching the two ears improves the ability to detect and discriminate the signal in the noise (86,87). Third, when trying to hear a sound such as speech in the presence of background noise, the speech-to-noise ratio may be much higher at one ear than at the other ear, as a result of acoustic head-shadow effects.…”

Section: Benefits Of Two Ears For Normal Listenersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coding of Sounds in the Auditory System and Its Relevance to Signal Processing and Coding in Cochlear Implants

Moore

2003

Otology & Neurotology

146

127

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Objective: To review how the properties of sounds are "coded" in the normal auditory system and to discuss the extent to which cochlear implants can and do represent these codes. Data Sources: Data are taken from published studies of the response of the cochlea and auditory nerve to simple and complex stimuli, in both the normal and the electrically stimulated ear. Review Content: The review describes: 1) the coding in the normal auditory system of overall level (which partly determines perceived loudness), spectral shape (which partly determines perceived timbre and the identity of speech sounds), periodicity (which partly determines pitch), and sound location; 2) the role of the active mechanism in the cochlea, and particularly the fast-acting compression associated with that mechanism; 3) the neural response patterns evoked by cochlear implants; and 4) how the response patterns evoked by implants differ from those observed in the normal auditory system in response to sound. A series of specific issues is then discussed, including: 1) how to compensate for the loss of cochlear compression; 2) the effective number of independent channels in a normal ear and in cochlear implantees; 3) the importance of independence of responses across neurons; 4) the stochastic nature of normal neural responses; 5) the possible role of across-channel coincidence detection; and 6) potential benefits of binaural implantation. Conclusions: Current cochlear implants do not adequately reproduce several aspects of the neural coding of sound in the normal auditory system. Improved electrode arrays and coding systems may lead to improved coding and, it is hoped, to better performance.

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The Influence of Interaural Phase on Interaural Summation and Inhibition

Cited by 123 publications

References 0 publications

Binaural Unmasking with Bilateral Cochlear Implants

Binaural Unmasking with Bilateral Cochlear Implants

Intelligibility for Binaural Speech with Discarded Low-SNR Speech Components

Coding of Sounds in the Auditory System and Its Relevance to Signal Processing and Coding in Cochlear Implants

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