A Design of Comfortable Dental Treatment Sound Based on Auditory Masking

摘要

In a dental treatment, patients and doctors often feel strong discomfort feeling by hearing the dental treatment sound. It is caused by peak frequency components on a high frequency-band. For reducing discomfort feeling of a single peak frequency component, we have previously proposed the discomfort reduction method that can mask a single peak frequency component based on auditory masking. Auditory masking is a phenomenon to increase an audible level by a composite sound. Here, we focus on discomfort feeling of the dental treatment sound. The previous method has difficulty applying it to the discomfort reduction of the dental treatment sound because it has multiple-peak-frequency components. In this paper, we therefore propose a new method for designing the masking sound that can mask them. The proposed method employs the comfortable nature sound including a running water sound as the sound source of the masking sound to achieve a comfortable masking sound design. As a result of subjective experiments, we confirmed that the proposed method can make the dental treatment sound more comfortable.