An application of boundary element method calculations to hearing aid systems: The influence of the human head

Boundary element method (BEM) calculations are used for the purpose of predicting the acoustic influence of the human head in two cases. In the first case the sound source is the mouth and in the second case the sound is plane waves arriving from different directions in the horizontal plane. In both cases the sound field is studied in relation to two positions above the right ear being representative of hearing aid microphone positions. Both cases are relevant for hearing aid development. The calculations are based upon a direct BEM implementation in Matlab. The meshing is based on the original geometrical data files describing the B&K Head and Torso Simulator 4128 combined with a 3D scan of the pinna.