Development of a new series of tests to assess the effectiveness of hearing aids for the perception of music

A new series of tests has been designed to assess the effectiveness of hearing aids for the perception of music. Within each subtest, discrimination thresholds for low-level acoustic dimensions are determined adaptively using a 2AFC method within the context of a musical judgment regarding melody, harmony, timbre or meter. The presented test stimuli are synthesized and either unprocessed or processed by different hearing aid signal processing algorithms before being played back via loudspeaker. The battery will be used to evaluate different hearing aid algorithms with regard to their benefit for functional hearing in music. A group of six normal hearing control participants (6.7 dB HL) and five hearing impaired participants (34 dB HL) each performed the melody subtest and the harmony subtest twice. The hearing impaired subjects had higher discrimination thresholds than the control group. A comparison of the results from both administrations suggests that these two subtests have good test-retest reliability.