Book Review: Digital Hearing AIDS
Ron Brouillette · Community Ear and Hearing Health · 2010
SYNOPSIS: This valuable resource on digital signal processing (DSP) principles and approaches is designed to inform and guide anyone interested in hearing sciences. The text focuses on the complexities of signal processing algorithms used in modern digital hearing aids and therein presumes the reader has a basic understanding of hearing aid fitting algorithms and their mathematical concepts and representations. Common features found in modern hearing aids such as feedback cancellation, wind protection screens, dynamic range compression, multiple and single microphones arc described with clarity in the text and additionally illustrated with mathematical representations. The textbook contains 13 chapters that range from the basics of analog to digital Hearing Aid Technologies, in Chapter 1 through the specific algorithms required to balance Bilateral Signal Processing in the final Chapter 13. In between these chapters, the reader is confronted with the myriad of insights and challenges to the hearing aid user including “the Cocktail Party” and other effects that compromise desired signal to noise ratios. Chapter 2 introduces Signal Processing Basics; Chapters 3 - 7 deal with the DSP hardware and algorithms; 3) the Electro-acoustic System; 4) Directional Microphones; 5) Adaptive and Multi-microphone Arrays; 6) Wind Noise-, and 7) Feedback Cancdlation.Thc remaining chapters cover signal processing related to physiological and perception dynamics: 8) Single Microphone Noise Suppression; 9) Spectral Subtraction; 10) Spectral Modifications; II) Sound Modifications (to improve speech intelligibility); and 12) Sound Classification to help determine parameters for algorithms in challenging listening environments.