Contribution
Lost in Transmission? Understanding and minimizing undesired side effects of hearing devices
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Headphones, hearing aids and similar devices are becoming increasingly smart while the boundaries between consumer electronics, medical hearing aids and hearing protectors are blurring. Despite different applications, they all have in common that the user hears the world through them electro-acoustically. One key factor for the performance of these devices is how acoustically transparent they are, meaning that apart from a desired modification, listening through these devices should be no different from hearing through ones own, open ears. However, acoustic transparency is principally and practically limited by imperfections in sound capturing, processing and reproduction of the hearing device. This circumstance often leads to undesired side effects regarding sound perception, including impairments of spatial hearing, lower performance and higher experienced effort in speech perception tasks, on top of poor sound quality of the surroundings and the wearers own voice.In this talk, I will review several studies examining the principal boundaries and technical solutions to minimize side effects of hearing devices. The approach to improve acoustic transparency is thereby linking undesired perceptual effects to signal modifications at the appropriate stage of the transmission chain, which remains an exciting and non-trivial task at the intersection of electro-acoustics, signal processing and psychoacoustics.