Reducing the effects of background noise during auditory functional magnetic resonance imaging of speech processing: qualitative and quantitative comparisons between two image acquisition schemes and noise cancellation.

Purpose: The intense sound generated during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) complicates studies of speech and hearing. This experiment evaluated the benefits of using active noise cancellation (ANC), which attenuates the level of the scanner sound at the participant's ear by up to 35 dB around the peak at 600 Hz.

Method: Speech and narrowband noise were presented at a low sound level to 8 listeners during fMRI using 2 common scanning protocols: short ("continuous") and long ("sparse") temporal schemes.