| Abstract | | Modern digital hearing aid technology that is heavily optimized for speech intelligibility often makes
music unlistenable, so that hearing aid wearers often prefer to remove their hearing aids when
listening to music. The effects of hearing aid processing on musical signals, and on the perception
of music have received very little attention. There is no standard test of music perception, and
to make the problem more difficult, different musical styles thrive in strikingly different acoustical
environments. There have been some studies on the effect of reduced bandwidth on the perceived
quality of music, but no systematic evaluation of the effects of dynamic range compression, the
most ubiquitous form of gain compensation in digital hearing aids.
In this report we present a novel approach to hearing aid fitting applied to both individual differences
in hearing impairment and differences among musical styles. The method uses a subjective
space approach to reduce the dimensionality of the fitting problem and a non-linear regression
technology to interpolate among hearing aid parameter settings. This listener-driven method provides
not only a technique for optimal aid fitting, but also information on individual differences and
the effects of gain compensation on different musical styles.
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