Objective analysis of ambisonics for hearing aid applications: effect of listener's head, room reverberation, and directional microphones

Chris Oreinos, Jörg M. Buchholz

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    34 Citations (Scopus)
    136 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    Recently, an increased interest has been demonstrated in evaluating hearing aids (HAs) inside controlled, but at the same time, realistic sound environments. A promising candidate that employs loudspeakers for realizing such sound environments is the listener-centered method of higher-order ambisonics (HOA). Although the accuracy of HOA has been widely studied, it remains unclear to what extent the results can be generalized when (1) a listener wearing HAs that may feature multi-microphone directional algorithms is considered inside the reconstructed sound field and (2) reverberant scenes are recorded and reconstructed. For the purpose of objectively validating HOA for listening tests involving HAs, a framework was developed to simulate the entire path of sounds presented in a modeled room, recorded by a HOA microphone array, decoded to a loudspeaker array, and finally received at the ears and HA microphones of a dummy listener fitted with HAs. Reproduction errors at the ear signals and at the output of a cardioid HA microphone were analyzed for different anechoic and reverberant scenes. It was found that the diffuse reverberation reduces the considered time-averaged HOA reconstruction errors which, depending on the considered application, suggests that reverberation can increase the usable frequency range of a HOA system.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)3447-3465
    Number of pages19
    JournalJournal of the Acoustical Society of America
    Volume137
    Issue number6
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2015

    Bibliographical note

    Copyright 2015 Acoustical Society of America. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the Acoustical Society of America. The following article appeared in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 137, Issue 6, pp. 3447-3465, and may be found at http://doi.org/10.1121/1.4919330

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