Publications by authors named "Michael Akeroyd"

This paper presents the Cadenza Woodwind Dataset. This publicly available data is synthesised audio for woodwind quartets including renderings of each instrument in isolation. The data was created to be used as training data within Cadenza's second open machine learning challenge (CAD2) for the task on rebalancing classical music ensembles.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Globally, while people are living longer, many experience a decline in health due to age-related diseases, highlighting the need for better classification systems to address these issues.
  • A consensus meeting with 150 experts established criteria for identifying ageing-related pathologies, requiring a 70% agreement for approval among participants.
  • The agreed criteria focus on conditions that progress with age, contribute to functional decline, and are backed by human studies, setting a foundation for future classification and staging efforts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rodent models of tinnitus are commonly used to study its mechanisms and potential treatments. Tinnitus can be identified by changes in the gap-induced prepulse inhibition of the acoustic startle (GPIAS), most commonly by using pressure detectors to measure the whole-body startle (WBS). Unfortunately, the WBS habituates quickly, the measuring system can introduce mechanical oscillations and the response shows considerable variability.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Previous work on audio quality evaluation has demonstrated a developing convergence of the key perceptual attributes underlying judgments of quality, such as timbral, spatial and technical attributes. However, across existing research there remains a limited understanding of the crucial perceptual attributes that inform audio quality evaluation for people with hearing loss, and those who use hearing aids. This is especially the case with music, given the unique problems it presents in contrast to human speech.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Researchers used a two-week online forum and thematic analysis across multiple countries to identify key themes related to tinnitus experiences and management strategies among adult CI recipients.
  • Main findings revealed that tinnitus was moderately burdensome without the sound processor, but not problematic when it was on; factors like fatigue, stress, and group conversations worsened tinnitus, while most participants managed it effectively by using their sound processors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This study presents the executive disruption model (EDM) of tinnitus distress and subsequently validates it statistically using two independent datasets (the Construction Dataset: = 96 and the Validation Dataset: = 200). The conceptual EDM was first operationalised as a structural causal model (construction phase). Then multiple regression was used to examine the effect of executive functioning on tinnitus-related distress (validation phase), adjusting for the additional contributions of hearing threshold and psychological distress.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The binaural system utilizes interaural timing cues to improve the detection of auditory signals presented in noise. In humans, the binaural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon cannot be directly measured and hence remain contentious. As an alternative, we trained modified autoencoder networks to mimic human-like behavior in a binaural detection task.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: To elucidate the long-term impacts of hearing loss, tinnitus and balance in people living with and beyond cancer (LWBC) treated with platinum-based chemotherapy (PBCT).

Methods: A literature search was conducted between March and June 2022 using PubMed, Web of Science and Google Scholar. Full-text papers in English were included.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This paper presents the Clarity Speech Corpus, a publicly available, forty speaker British English speech dataset. The corpus was created for the purpose of running listening tests to gauge speech intelligibility and quality in the Clarity Project, which has the goal of advancing speech signal processing by hearing aids through a series of challenges. The dataset is suitable for machine learning and other uses in speech and hearing technology, acoustics and psychoacoustics.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Previous cross-sectional findings indicate that hearing and cognitive abilities are positively correlated in childhood, adulthood, and older age. We used an unusually valuable longitudinal dataset from a single-year birth cohort study, the National Child Development Study 1958, to test how hearing and cognitive abilities relate to one another across the life course from childhood to middle age. Cognitive ability was assessed with a single test of general cognitive ability at age 11 years and again with multiple tests at age 50.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Tinnitus is a symptom linked to various medical conditions, with lifestyle factors like smoking, alcohol, BMI, and caffeine possibly influencing its development.
  • A systematic review of 384 studies found that smoking and obesity significantly increase tinnitus risk, while alcohol consumption showed no effect.
  • The research helps clarify the links between lifestyle factors and tinnitus but also points out inconsistencies in existing studies, indicating areas for further investigation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Objectives: Tinnitus is a chronic subjective condition that impacts patients' health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and requires multidisciplinary interventions. In health economics, quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and willingness to pay (WTP) are essential for evaluating treatment effectiveness in cost-effectiveness, cost-utility, or cost-benefit analysis. The extent to which these economic measures have been used in tinnitus research has not been investigated.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In dynamic multisensory environments, the perceptual system corrects for discrepancies arising between modalities. For instance, in the ventriloquism aftereffect (VAE), spatial disparities introduced between visual and auditory stimuli lead to a perceptual recalibration of auditory space. Previous research has shown that the VAE is underpinned by multiple recalibration mechanisms tuned to different timescales, however it remains unclear whether these mechanisms use common or distinct spatial reference frames.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Core Outcome Measures in Tinnitus (COMiT) initiative has recommended a minimum standard of five outcomes when designing a clinical trial to assess the efficacy of sound-based interventions. These are: ability to ignore, concentration, quality of sleep, sense of control and tinnitus intrusiveness. The next stage is to consider what measurement instruments might be appropriate for assessing these constructs.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The variation of interaural level difference (ILD) with direction and frequency is particularly complex and convoluted. The purpose of this work was to determine a set of parametric equations that can be used to calculate ILDs continuously at any value of frequency and azimuth in the horizontal plane. They were derived by fitting equations to ILDs derived from the azimuthal-dependence data tabulated by Shaw and Vaillancourt [(1985).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Tinnitus is the perception of sound in the absence of a corresponding external sound source, and bothersome tinnitus has been linked to poorer cognitive performance. This review comprehensively quantifies the association between tinnitus and different domains of cognitive performance. The review protocol was preregistered and published in a peer-reviewed journal.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The 1011-page book, Hearing in Adults, published in 1995, contains the fullest report of the United Kingdom’s Medical Research Council National Study of Hearing. It was designed to determine the prevalence and distribution in Great Britain of audiometrically measured hearing loss as a function of age, gender, occupation, and noise exposure. The study’s size, quality, and breadth made it unique when it was done in the 1980s.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Hearing impairment is associated with poorer cognitive function in later life. We tested for the potential contribution of childhood cognitive ability to this relationship. Childhood cognitive ability is strongly related to cognitive function in older age, and may be related to auditory function through its association with hearing impairment risk factors.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

To maintain perceptual coherence, the brain corrects for discrepancies between the senses. If, for example, lights are consistently offset from sounds, representations of auditory space are remapped to reduce this error (spatial recalibration). While recalibration effects have been observed following both brief and prolonged periods of adaptation, the relative contribution of discrepancies occurring over these timescales is unknown.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Prevalence estimates depend largely on the nature of the question asked to define the presence of the health condition, and the literature on the population burden of tinnitus and hearing difficulties is no different in this respect. The lack of standardized questions for data collection limits comparison across studies and across countries. The purpose of this short Technical Note is to report the first attempt to establish a set of standard questions developed for use in population-based surveys, and their adaptation and translation from English into 11 European languages.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Subjective tinnitus is very common and has a number of comorbid associations including depression, sleep disturbance and concentration difficulties. Concentration difficulties may be observable in people with tinnitus through poorer behavioural performance in tasks thought to measure specific cognitive domains such as attention and memory (ie, cognitive performance). Several reviews have discussed the association between tinnitus and cognition; however, none to date have investigated the association between tinnitus and cognitive performance through meta-analysis with reference to an established theoretical taxonomy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A number of assessment tools exist to evaluate the impact of hearing loss, with little consensus among researchers as to either preference or psychometric adequacy. The item content of hearing loss assessment tools should seek to capture the impact of hearing loss on everyday life, but to date no one has synthesized the range of hearing loss complaints from the perspectives of the person with hearing loss and their communication partner. The current review aims to synthesize the evidence on person with hearing loss- and communication partner-reported complaints of hearing loss.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Hearing is confronted by a similar problem to vision when the observer moves. The image motion that is created remains ambiguous until the observer knows the velocity of eye and/or head. One way the visual system solves this problem is to use motor commands, proprioception, and vestibular information.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Tinnitus has been linked to noise exposure, a common form of which is listening to music as a leisure activity. The relationship between tinnitus and type and duration of music exposure is not well understood. We conducted an internet-based population study that asked participants questions about lifetime music exposure and hearing, and included a hearing test involving speech intelligibility in noise, the High Frequency Digit Triplets Test.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF