Hearing Loss Auralization

The following auralization was developed to show the effects of neurosensoral hearing loss on the intelligibility of female speech.  Below are shown the typical hearing attenuation of someone with moderate and severe hearing loss along with photographs showing the cilia damage in the cochlea that could produce each condition
Hearing Loss Attenuation Curve Cochlea Photo
attenuation of person with no hearing loss photo of normal cochlea
attenuation of person with moderate hearing loss photo of cilia damage of person with moderate hearing loss
attenuation of person with severe hearing loss
 photo of cochlear damage of person with severe hearing loss
These auralizations were created by applying frequency dependent attenuation to an anechoic recording of the female voice using Adobe Auditon. The attenuation curves for the three conditions were taken from a web page at the University of Wisconsin: http://www.neurophys.wisc.edu/animations/.
These auralizations only show the effects of attenuation - they do not include any additional distortions that occur in addition to the attenuation with neuro-sensory hearing loss. As a result, these auralizations are only a very rough approximation to the sound perceptions of people who have hearing impairments.

The female voice in these auralizations comes from the Bang and Olufsen "Music for Archimedes" CD, © Bang and Olufsen and are used for educational purposes under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. As a result, this page has limited distribution and uncontrolled public access of those portions which include copyrighted content is not allowed.
Creative Commons License