Reproducing real-life listening situations in the laboratory for testing hearing aids

摘要

The main purpose of the current study was to demonstrate how a Virtual Sound Environment (VSE), consisting of 29 loudspeakers, can be used in the development of hearing aids. A listening test was done by recording everyday sound scenes with a spherical microphone array that has 32 microphone capsules. The playback in the VSE was implemented by convolving the recordings with inverse filters, which were derived by directly inverting a matrix of 928 measured transfer functions. While listening to five sound scenes, 10 hearing-impaired listeners could switch between hearing aid settings in real time, by interacting with a touch screen in a MUSHRA-like test. The setup proofs to be very valuable for ensuring that hearing aid settings work well in real-world situations.