Quality of older voices processed by hearing aids: Acoustic factors explaining inter-talker differences
Huiwen Goy, Margaret Kathleen Pichora-Fuller, Pascal H. H. M. Van Lieshout, Kathryn Hoberg Arehart · Proceedings of meetings on acoustics · 2013
Hearing aid signal processing algorithms are often evaluated with professional recordings of voices. However, hearing aid users often listen to older talkers who may have poorer voices than younger talkers. The purpose of this study was to quantify the extent to which the acoustic and perceptual consequences of hearing aid digital signal processing algorithms differ for talkers that vary in their vocal characteristics. There were five talkers (2 male and 3 female) selected from a larger database of 60 talkers; their voices had good, moderate or poor quality based on perceptual data from younger and older listeners. The voices were presented in quiet and in the presence of babble noise (-5 to +20 dB SNR). The voices were processed with varying amounts of frequency compression, wide dynamic range compression and noise suppression (spectral subtraction). There were interactions between signal processing and voice characteristics as measured using the Hearing Aid Speech Quality Index (HASQI) and listener ratings of perceived sound quality of the processed speech. In this paper, we examine the possible acoustic sources that may explain these interactions, including inter-talker differences in formant space and pitch variation. [Research supported by NIH, GN Resound, NSERC, and the Canada Research Chairs program.]