2 posts tagged with "noise"

We’ll be challenging our contestants to find innovative ways of making speech more audible for hearing impaired listeners when there is noise getting in the way. But what noises should we consider? To aid us in choosing sounds and situations that are relevant to people with hearing aids, we held a focus group.

We wanted to know about

• Everyday background noises that make having a conversation difficult.
• The characteristics of speech after it has been processed by a hearing-aid that hearing aid listeners would value.

A total of eight patients (four males, four females) attended the meeting, six of whom were recruited from the Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre’s patient and public involvement contact list. Two attendees were recruited from a local lip reading class organised by the Nottinghamshire Deaf Society. The range of hearing loss within the group is from mild to severe. They all regularly use bilateral hearing aids.

Our focus was on the living room because that is the scenario for round one of the challenges.

Photo by Gustavo Fring from Pexels

People often have problems understanding speech in noise, and this is one of the main deficits of hearing aids that our machine learning challenges will address.

It’s common for us to hear sounds coming simultaneously from different sources. Our brains then need to separate out what we want to hear (the target speaker) from the other sounds. This is especially difficult when the competing sounds are speech. This has the quaint name, The Cocktail Party Problem (Cherry, 1953). We don’t go to many cocktail parties, but we encounter lots of times where the The Cocktail Party Problem is important. Hearing a conversation in a busy restaurant, trying to understand a loved one while the television is on or hearing the radio in the kitchen when the kettle is boiling, are just a few examples.

Difficulty in picking out speech in noise is really common if you have a hearing loss. Indeed, it’s often when people have problems doing this that they realise they have a hearing loss.

“Hearing aids don’t work when there is a lot of background noise. This is when you need them to work.”

-- Statement from a hearing aid wearer (Kochkin, 2000)

Hearing aids are the the most common form of treatment for hearing loss. However, surveys indicate that at least 40% of hearing aids are never or rarely used (Knudsen et al., 2010). A major reason for this is dissatisfaction with performance. Even the best hearing aids perform poorly for speech in noise. This is particularly the case when there are many people talking at the same time, and when the amount of noise is relatively high (i.e., the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low). As hearing ability worsen with age, the ability to understand speech in background noise also reduces (e.g., Akeroyd, 2008).