Hearing impairment simulator based on compressive gammachirp filter

Abstract

This paper describes a simulator for presenting normal hearing (NH) listeners with the experience of a hearing impaired (HI) listener. The simulator is based on the compressive gammachirp (cGC) filter used to derive level-dependent filter shapes and the cochlear compression function from to notched-noise masking data. The level dependence of the cGC is reversed to produce inverse compression which is used to resynthesize sounds that cancel the compression applied by the auditory system of the NH listener. A frame-based analysis/synthesis procedure is newly introduced to improve processing speed for a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows the users to control the degree of compression within the range of the audiogram of the HI person. The simulator is intended for speech-language-hearing therapists (ST) and patients' families.