Brungart Douglas S, Cohen Julie I, Zion Danielle, Romigh Griffin
National Military Audiology and Speech Pathology Center, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, 8901 Wisconsin Avenue, Bethesda, Maryland 20889, USA.
The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, 6720A Rockledge Drive, Bethesda, Maryland 20817, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2017 Apr;141(4):2870. doi: 10.1121/1.4979462.
Although many studies have evaluated the performance of virtual audio displays with normal hearing listeners, very little information is available on the effect that hearing loss has on the localization of virtual sounds. In this study, normal hearing (NH) and hearing impaired (HI) listeners were asked to localize noise stimuli with short (250 ms), medium (1000 ms), and long (4000 ms) durations both in the free field and with a non-individualized head-tracked virtual audio display. The results show that the HI listeners localized sounds less accurately than the NH listeners, and that both groups consistently localized virtual sounds less accurately than free-field sounds. These results indicate that HI listeners are sensitive to individual differences in head related transfer functions (HRTFs), which means that they might have difficulty using auditory display systems that rely on generic HRTFs to control the apparent locations of virtual sounds. However, the results also reveal a high correlation between free-field and virtual localization performance in the HI listeners. This suggests that it may be feasible to use non-individualized virtual audio display systems to predict the auditory localization performance of HI listeners in clinical environments where free-field speaker arrays are not available.
尽管许多研究已经评估了正常听力的听众对虚拟音频显示的表现，但关于听力损失对虚拟声音定位的影响，目前几乎没有相关信息。在本研究中，正常听力（NH）和听力受损（HI）的听众被要求在自由场以及使用非个性化头部跟踪虚拟音频显示的情况下，对短（250毫秒）、中（1000毫秒）和长（4000毫秒）时长的噪声刺激进行定位。结果表明，HI听众对声音的定位不如NH听众准确，并且两组听众对虚拟声音的定位始终不如自由场声音准确。这些结果表明，HI听众对头部相关传递函数（HRTF）的个体差异敏感，这意味着他们可能难以使用依赖通用HRTF来控制虚拟声音表观位置的听觉显示系统。然而，结果还揭示了HI听众在自由场和虚拟定位表现之间存在高度相关性。这表明，在没有自由场扬声器阵列的临床环境中，使用非个性化虚拟音频显示系统来预测HI听众的听觉定位表现可能是可行的。
