Detection of environmental sounds

01 Jul Detection of environmental sounds

This study takes about 25 minutes and is $15 in compensation for your time. You will wear a pair of insert earphones and listen to a series of audio clips and indicate on a laptop if a siren was present or not.

Newer hearing technologies can selectively reduce (“suppress”) unwanted sounds in a listener’s environment by large amounts. These systems are evaluated on how well they isolate the sounds a listener wants to hear, but not on what a listener may lose – specifically, whether an environmental sound that has been suppressed can still be detected. This study measures that limit.

The objective is to determine how strongly a target environmental sound (a recorded emergency-vehicle siren) can be digitally reduced in level, relative to a background noise, before normal-hearing adults can no longer reliably detect it. We will characterize detection performance across a range of suppression levels and estimate the suppression level at which detection falls to a defined threshold.

We hypothesize that detection will decline in an orderly way as suppression increases, and that there is a measurable suppression level beyond which the sound is no longer reliably detected. The results define a “sensory floor” for environmental-sound awareness that is relevant to the safe design of these technologies.

Participant Eligibility

• Ages 18–35
• Native or early-childhood English speaker (learned before age 5)
• Normal hearing (no hearing loss, ear surgery, or ear infections)
• No history of neurological conditions or speech/language disorders
• Currently healthy (no active cold/sinus/ear infection)
• Able to wear soft insert earphones comfortably

Contact

Riya Yerramilli
(425) 922-8882