Role of Binaural Temporal Fine Structure and Envelope Cues in Cocktail-Party Listening.

Unlabelled: While conversing in a crowded social setting, a listener is often required to follow a target speech signal amid multiple competing speech signals (the so-called "cocktail party" problem). In such situations, separation of the target speech signal in azimuth from the interfering masker signals can lead to an improvement in target intelligibility, an effect known as spatial release from masking (SRM). This study assessed the contributions of two stimulus properties that vary with separation of sound sources, binaural envelope (ENV) and temporal fine structure (TFS), to SRM in normal-hearing (NH) human listeners.

Musical training, individual differences and the cocktail party problem.

Are musicians better able to understand speech in noise than non-musicians? Recent findings have produced contradictory results. Here we addressed this question by asking musicians and non-musicians to understand target sentences masked by other sentences presented from different spatial locations, the classical 'cocktail party problem' in speech science. We found that musicians obtained a substantial benefit in this situation, with thresholds ~6 dB better than non-musicians.

Design and preliminary testing of a visually guided hearing aid.

An approach to hearing aid design is described, and preliminary acoustical and perceptual measurements are reported, in which an acoustic beam-forming microphone array is coupled to an eye-glasses-mounted eye-tracker. This visually guided hearing aid (VGHA)-currently a laboratory-based prototype-senses direction of gaze using the eye tracker and an interface converts those values into control signals that steer the acoustic beam accordingly. Preliminary speech intelligibility measurements with noise and speech maskers revealed near- or better-than normal spatial release from masking with the VGHA.

The intelligibility of pointillistic speech.

A form of processed speech is described that is highly discriminable in a closed-set identification format. The processing renders speech into a set of sinusoidal pulses played synchronously across frequency. The processing and results from several experiments are described.

Effect of spatial uncertainty of masker on masked detection for nonspeech stimuli.

Research on informational masking for nonspeech stimuli has focused on the effects of spectral uncertainty in the masker. In this letter, results are presented from some preliminary probe experiments in which the spectrum of the masker is held fixed but the spatial properties of the masker are randomized. In addition, in some tests, the overall level of the stimulus is randomized.