A REVIEW OF THE EFFECT OF HEARING PROTECTIVE DEVICES ON AUDITORY PERCEPTION: THE INTEGRATION OF ACTIVE NOISE REDUCTION AND BINAURAL TECHNOLOGIES
- Authors
- Corporate Authors
- Defence and Civil Inst of Environmental Medicine, Downsview ONT (CAN);Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto ONT (CAN) Samuel Lunenfeld Research Inst
- Abstract
- This review evaluates the feasibility of integrating two relatively new technologies in the design and implementation of communication headsets for use in noisy environments. The first technology, known as active noise reduction (ANR), improves speech intelligibility by reducing the amount of interfering noise from the environment. THis is accomplished by electronic sound wave cancellation inside the earcup. The second technology, known as binaural technology, allows the synthesis of directional auditory displays. The aim is to enhance speech intelligibility and situational awareness, compared with diotic listening. Since both ANR and binaural technologies can assist in enhancing intelligibility, the potential exists for large intelligibility gains when integrating the two technologies. The review begins with a comprehensive discussion of passive and active strategies currently used to reduce high-level noise exposure with personal hearing protective devices. Particular attention is paid to those factors (including characteristics of the listener, such as hearing status, age and fluency with test language) affecting auditory perception tasks such as detection, discrimination, word recognition and sound localization. Next, an overivew is presented of fundamental research on binaural hearing and binaural technology. TRUNCATED
- Keywords
- Binaural technology;Head-related transfer functions;Hearing protective devices;3-D auditory display
- Report Number
- DCIEM-97-CR-38 — Contract Report (Final)
- Date of publication
- 30 Dec 1997
- Number of Pages
- 55
- DSTKIM No
- 98-00637
- CANDIS No
- 507527
- Format(s):
- Hardcopy;Document Image stored on Optical Disk
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