WHIS: Hearing impairment simulator based on the gammachirp auditory filterbank

TL;DR

This paper introduces WHIS, a hearing impairment simulator based on an improved gammachirp filterbank, capable of simulating various hearing loss profiles with reduced spectral distortion and flexible processing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a revised WHIS with enhanced processing, a new parameter for cochlear IO control, and two synthesis methods, advancing hearing impairment simulation accuracy and flexibility.

Findings

WHIS accurately simulates hearing loss at low to moderate impairment levels.

The new WHIS shows smaller spectral distortion compared to existing simulators.

Simulation accuracy decreases at high impairment levels (α=1).

Abstract

A new version of a hearing impairment simulator (WHIS) was implemented based on a revised version of the gammachirp filterbank (GCFB), which incorporates fast frame-based processing, absolute threshold (AT), an audiogram of a hearing-impaired (HI) listener, and a parameter to control the cochlear input-output (IO) function. The parameter referred to as the compression health $\alpha$ controlled the slope of the IO function to range from normal hearing (NH) listeners to HI listeners, without largely changing the total hearing loss (HL). The new WHIS was designed provide an NH listener the same EPs as those of a target HI listener.The analysis part of WHIS was almost the same as that of the revised GCFB, except that the IO function was used instead of the gain function. We proposed two synthesis methods: a direct time-varying filter for perceptually small distortion and a filterbank analysis-synthesis for further HI simulations including temporal smearing. We evaluated the WHIS family and a Cambridge version of the HL simulator (CamHLS) in terms of differences in the IO function and spectral distance. The IO functions were simulated fairly well at $\alpha$ less than 0.5 but not at $\alpha$ equal to 1. Thus, it is difficult to simulate the HL when the IO function is sufficiently healthy. This is a fundamental limit of any existing HL simulator as well as WHIS. The new WHIS yielded a smaller spectral distortion than CamHLS and was fairly compatible with the previous version.