The effects of wide-dynamic-range compression (WDRC) on the ability of hearing-impaired subjects to hear out individual instruments or voices (called “sources”) in a mixture were explored. On each trial, the subjects were asked to judge the relative clarity of the target in two repetitions of the same music excerpt (mixture of sources) that were processed in different ways. The stimuli were processed via a five-channel simulated WDRC hearing aid, using individual insertion gains and compression ratios recommended by the CAM2 fitting procedure. Both fast- and slow-acting WDRC and a condition with linear amplification and frequency-response shaping were used. To investigate the role of cross-modulation (the partial correlation of the envelopes of different sources caused by the time-varying gain applied by the compressor), conditions were included where the sounds from different sources were compressed before being added together and where the sounds were added together before being compressed. The results showed no effect of cross-modulation, lower clarity with WDRC than with linear amplification, and no significant overall effect of compression speed, although some subjects consistently rated clarity as greater with slow compression. The deleterious effect of WDRC may be related to changes in temporal-envelope shape or reduced spectral contrast produced by WDRC.
References
1.
ANSI
(2003
). ANSI S3.22-2003, Specification of Hearing Aid Characteristics
(American National Standards Institute
, New York
).2.
Baer
, T.
, Moore
, B. C. J.
, and Kluk
, K.
(2002
). “Effects of lowpass filtering on the intelligibility of speech in noise for people with and without dead regions at high frequencies
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
112
, 1133
–1144
.3.
Bregman
, A. S.
, Abramson
, J.
, Doehring
, P.
, and Darwin
, C. J.
(1985
). “Spectral integration based on common amplitude modulation
,” Percept. Psychophys.
37
, 483
–493
.4.
Chasin
, M.
, and Hockley
, N. S.
(2014
). “Some characteristics of amplified music through hearing aids
,” Hear. Res.
308
, 2
–12
.5.
Croghan
, N. B. H.
, Arehart
, K. H.
, and Kates
, J. M.
(2014
). “Music preferences with hearing aids: Effects of signal properties, compression settings, and listener characteristics
,” Ear Hear.
35
, e170
–184
.6.
Davies-Venn
, E.
, Souza
, P.
, and Fabry
, D.
(2007
). “Speech and music quality ratings for linear and nonlinear hearing aid circuitry
,” J. Am. Acad. Audiol.
18
, 688
–699
.7.
8.
Duquesnoy
, A. J.
(1983
). “Effect of a single interfering noise or speech source on the binaural sentence intelligibility of aged persons
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
74
, 739
–743
.9.
Festen
, J. M.
, and Plomp
, R.
(1990
). “Effects of fluctuating noise and interfering speech on the speech-reception threshold for impaired and normal hearing
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
88
, 1725
–1736
.10.
Fowler
, E. P.
(1936
). “A method for the early detection of otosclerosis
,” Arch. Otolaryngol.
24
, 731
–741
.11.
Iverson
, P.
(1995
). “Auditory stream segregation by musical timbre: Effects of static and dynamic acoustic attributes
,” J. Exp. Psychol.
21
, 751
–763
.12.
Iverson
, P.
, and Krumhansl
, C. L.
(1993
). “Isolating the dynamic attributes of musical timbre
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
94
, 2595
–2603
.13.
Laurence
, R. F.
, Moore
, B. C. J.
, and Glasberg
, B. R.
(1983
). “A comparison of behind-the-ear high-fidelity linear aids and two-channel compression hearing aids in the laboratory and in everyday life
,” Br. J. Audiol.
17
, 31
–48
.14.
Madsen
, S. M. K.
, and Moore
, B. C. J.
(2014a
). “Effects of compression and onset/offset asynchronies on the detection of one tone in the presence of another
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
135
, 2902
–2912
.15.
Madsen
, S. M. K.
, and Moore
, B. C. J.
(2014b
). “Music and hearing aids
,” Trends Hear.
18
, 1
–29
.16.
Margolis
, R. H.
, Eikelboom
, R. H.
, Johnson
, C.
, Ginter
, S. M.
, Swanepoel
, D. W.
, and Moore
, B. C. J.
(2013
). “False air-bone gaps at 4 kHz in listeners with normal hearing and sensorineural hearing loss
,” Int. J. Audiol.
52
, 526
–532
.17.
Marozeau
, J.
, Innes-Brown
, H.
, and Blamey
, P. J.
(2013
). “The effect of timbre and loudness on melody segregation
,” Music Percept.
30
, 259
–274
.18.
Moore
, B. C. J.
(2007
). Cochlear Hearing Loss: Physiological, Psychological and Technical Issues
, 2nd ed. (Wiley
, Chichester, UK
), pp. 201
–240
.19.
Moore
, B. C. J.
(2008
). “The choice of compression speed in hearing aids: Theoretical and practical considerations, and the role of individual differences
,” Trends Amplif.
12
, 103
–112
.20.
Moore
, B. C. J.
, Füllgrabe
, C.
, and Stone
, M. A.
(2010a
). “Effect of spatial separation, extended bandwidth, and compression speed on intelligibility in a competing-speech task
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
128
, 360
–371
.21.
Moore
, B. C. J.
, Füllgrabe
, C.
, and Stone
, M. A.
(2011
). “Determination of preferred parameters for multi-channel compression using individually fitted simulated hearing aids and paired comparisons
,” Ear Hear.
32
, 556
–568
.22.
Moore
, B. C. J.
, Glasberg
, B. R.
, and Stone
, M. A.
(2004
). “New version of the TEN test with calibrations in dB HL
,” Ear Hear.
25
, 478
–487
.23.
Moore
, B. C. J.
, Glasberg
, B. R.
, and Stone
, M. A.
(2010b
). “Development of a new method for deriving initial fittings for hearing aids with multi-channel compression: CAMEQ2-HF
,” Int. J. Audiol.
49
, 216
–227
.24.
Moore
, B. C. J.
, Johnson
, J. S.
, Clark
, T. M.
, and Pluvinage
, V.
(1992
). “Evaluation of a dual-channel full dynamic range compression system for people with sensorineural hearing loss
,” Ear Hear.
13
, 349
–370
.25.
Plomp
, R.
(1994
). “Noise, amplification, and compression: Considerations of three main issues in hearing aid design
,” Ear Hear.
15
, 2
–12
.26.
Singh
, P. G.
, and Bregman
, A. S.
(1997
). “The influence of different timbre attributes on the perceptual segregation of complex-tone sequences
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
102
, 1943
–1952
.27.
Stainsby
, T. H.
, Moore
, B. C. J.
, and Glasberg
, B. R.
(2004
). “Auditory streaming based on temporal structure in hearing-impaired listeners
,” Hear. Res.
192
, 119
–130
.28.
Steinberg
, J. C.
, and Gardner
, M. B.
(1937
). “The dependence of hearing impairment on sound intensity
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
9
, 11
–23
.29.
Stone
, M. A.
, and Moore
, B. C. J.
(2004
). “Side effects of fast-acting dynamic range compression that affect intelligibility in a competing speech task
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
116
, 2311
–2323
.30.
Stone
, M. A.
, and Moore
, B. C. J.
(2007
). “Quantifying the effects of fast-acting compression on the envelope of speech
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
121
, 1654
–1664
.31.
Stone
, M. A.
, and Moore
, B. C. J.
(2008
). “Effects of spectro-temporal modulation changes produced by multi-channel compression on intelligibility in a competing-speech task
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
123
, 1063
–1076
.32.
Stone
, M. A.
, Moore
, B. C. J.
, Füllgrabe
, C.
, and Hinton
, A. C.
(2009
). “Multi-channel fast-acting dynamic-range compression hinders performance by young, normal-hearing listeners in a two-talker separation task
,” J. Audio Eng. Soc.
57
, 532
–546
.33.
Tan
, C. T.
, Moore
, B. C. J.
, and Zacharov
, N.
(2003
). “The effect of nonlinear distortion on the perceived quality of music and speech signals
,” J. Audio Eng. Soc.
51
, 1012
–1031
.34.
van Buuren
, R. A.
, Festen
, J.
, and Houtgast
, T.
(1999
). “Compression and expansion of the temporal envelope: Evaluation of speech intelligibility and sound quality
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
105
, 2903
–2913
.35.
van Noorden
, L. P. A. S.
(1975
). “Temporal coherence in the perception of tone sequences
,” Ph.D. thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology
, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.36.
Vickers
, D. A.
, Moore
, B. C. J.
, and Baer
, T.
(2001
). “Effects of lowpass filtering on the intelligibility of speech in quiet for people with and without dead regions at high frequencies
,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
110
, 1164
–1175
.© 2015 Acoustical Society of America.
2015
Acoustical Society of America
You do not currently have access to this content.