UCL PSYCHOLOGY AND LANGUAGE SCIENCES

Faculty of Brain Sciences

UCL  |  PALS  |  Resources in Speech, Hearing & Phonetics

HearLoss - Hearing Loss Demonstrator SHAPS HOME

HearLoss is an interactive Windows PC program for demonstrating to normally RESOURCES & TOOLS
hearing people the e ects of hearing loss. With HearLoss you can replay
speech, music and noise under a variety of loudness, ltering and masking WEB SHOP
conditions typical of hearing impairments. Best of all you can interactively
change the settings and demonstrate their consequences.

Some other pages on

our site you may enjoy:

HEARLOSS - Hearing
Impairment
Demonstrator
HearLoss is a
free
interactive
Windows PC
program for
demonstrating to normally

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 Description hearing people the e ects
of hearing loss. More
The HearLoss program plays back pre-recorded audio samples of some information.
speech, some music and some typical background noise, either singly or in
combination. As it replays, three sliders control a simulation of the e ects of RTPITCH - Real-time
three common consequences of hearing loss: loss in amplitude sensitivity, Pitch Track Display
reduction in frequency range, and loss in spectral detail. Changes in the
amplitude sensitivity slider changes the loudness of the sound, changes to the RTPITCH is a
frequency range slider changes the upper frequency limit of the sound, while free program
changes to the spectral detail slider changes the amount of ne structure for displaying
present in the spectrum. a real-time
fundamental frequency
Download & Installation track for a speech signal
on Windows computers.
The program is only available for Windows PCs from More information.

Full installation including sound samples [5Mb]:

https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/downloads/sfs/hearloss/hearloss111.exe
Program only [0.5Mb]:
https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/downloads/sfs/hearloss/hearloss.exe

Full installation including sound samples - German translation [5Mb]:

https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/downloads/sfs/hearloss/hearloss120german.exe
Program only - German translation [0.5Mb]:
https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/downloads/sfs/hearloss/hearloss-german.exe

To download the full installation, right click on the link above and choose
"Save Target As". Save the le to your desktop or to a folder on your computer.
Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 Then run the le to install the program and to add an entry to your Start
Programs menu. Once installed you can delete the downloaded le.

The full installation comes with three short audio samples in these les:

speech.wav - sample of speech signal

music.wav - sample of music signal
noise.wav - sample of noise signal

You can replace these with audio samples of your own. To make the audio les
compatible with HearLoss, ensure that the les are saved with the format:
"PCM 44.1kHz 16-bit Mono". The Windows Sound Recorder application can
convert WAV les between formats.

To download the program alone, right click on the second link above and
choose "Save Target As". Save the le to a new folder on your computer. You
will then need to provide your own sound les as described above and put
them in the same folder as the program.

Suggestions for Use

This is one way you might use the program to demonstrate the e ects of
hearing loss to normally-hearing people:

1. Start the music playing and adjust levels so that the audience can hear it
clearly. Stop the music.

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 2. Explain that deafness is not just all or nothing, but that hearing impairments
come in various degrees.
3. Play music and demonstrate loss in amplitude sensitivity to mild, moderate
and severe losses.
4. Repeat for speech. Point out that di culty in hearing speech a ects our
social interactions - we can't follow what is going on in a group
conversation, for example.
5. Explain that if hearing loss was just a loss in sensitivity, then we could
restore peoples' hearing with just an ampli er.
6. Explain that most hearing loss is not just a drop in quantity but also a dop in
the quality of sound perceived. In particular the kind of hearing impairment
asoociated with old age has associated changes in frequency range and
spectral detail.
7. Play music and demonstrate what a reduction in frequency range means:
at mild, moderate and severe levels.
8. Repeat for speech. Point out that even if the speech were loud enough, the
loss of high frequencies makes it harder to understand.
9. Play music and demonstrate the consequences of a loss in spectral detail.
The e ect of this slider is like looking at an out-of-focus photograph - you
can't see all the ne detail. Get the audience to listen as you bring the slider
back to normal - you should hear the signal getting "clearer".
10. Play speech and noise simultaneously with sliders set to normal. Point out
that the speech is still fairly easy to understand.

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 11. Add a moderate loss of frequency range and spectral detail. The speech is
pretty unintelligible now, although it becomes a bit clearer when the noise
is turned o . Hearing impaired people nd listening in conditions of noise
far more di cult than normally hearing people.

Technical details
The three audio les are loaded into memory and scaled so that they can not
overload the output when added together. When replay starts, the combined
audio is processed in the frequency domain to remove frequency components
above some limit set by the frequency range slider, and to smear energy
across frequency according to the setting of the frequency selectivity slider.
The spectral smearing is based on the technique described by Baer & Moore
(1993). Amplitude sensitivity is changed partly through the Windows audio
mixer volume control and partly by scaling the signal.

The graphic equaliser display is based on a number of auditory lter sized

channels, each 1 bark wide. The graphic equaliser has a simple damping
mechanism to reduce ne temporal uctuations.

Approximate parameter settings for the sliders areas follows:

Hearing Amplitude Sensitivity Frequency Range Spectral Detail

Normal 0dB 20,000Hz 1 bark

Mild -25dB 5,000Hz 2 bark

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 Moderate -50dB 2,000Hz 3 bark

Severe -75dB 1,000Hz 4 bark

The bark scale is a measure of auditory lter width. When the frequency
selectivity control is set to one bark then sound components that fall within
one bark of one another interfere and so cannot be easily distinguished as
separate elements of the sound. By de nition, normal hearing has a frequency
selectivity of one bark, so the program does not need to do any additional
frequency smearing for the normal setting.

This program may not run correctly on PCs with a low processor speed which
are unable to perform the frequency analysis and synthesis in real time. A
processor speed of 1GHz or greater is recommended.

References
Thomas Baer & Brian Moore, "E ects of spectral smearing on the
intelligibility of sentences in noise", The Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America -- September 1993 -- Volume 94, Issue 3, pp. 1229-1241.

Bug reports
Please send suggestions for improvements and reports of program faults to
sfs@pals.ucl.ac.uk.

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
 Please note that we are unable to provide help with the use of this program.

Copyright
HearLoss is not public domain software, its intellectual property is owned by
Mark Huckvale, University College London. However HearLoss may be used
and copied without charge as long as the program remains unmodi ed and
continues to carry this copyright notice. Please contact the author for other
licensing arrangements. HearLoss carries no warranty of any kind, you use it at
your own risk.

Word count: 1181. Last modi ed: 07:06 09-May-2019. by Mark Huckvale
© 2019 Speech, Hearing & Phonetic Sciences, UCL

Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD