Musical piece selection for discomfort reduction of dental treatment sound based on auditory masking in time and frequency domains

摘要

In a dental treatment, doctors and patients often feel strong discomfort feeling by hearing dental treatment sounds. It is caused by spectral peaks in a higher frequency. For reducing discomfort feeling of spectral peaks, we have previously proposed the discomfort reduction method that can mask spectral peaks on basis of auditory masking in the frequency domain. Auditory masking is a phenomenon that a listener is difficult to perceive a pure tone of the specific frequency by a band-limited noise with the critical band of that. However, this method has difficulty in tracing temporal fluctuation of spectral peaks. Here, we focus on musical pieces that have variation of temporally changing in spectral characteristics. In this paper, we therefore propose the discomfort reduction method based on combination of musical pieces and auditory masking. In addition, we investigate the suitable musical pieces for reducing discomfort of dental treatment sounds. As a result of subjective evaluation experiments, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method.