Increasing Hearing Ability – Using
Frequency Shifting and Channel
Control
Yuan Alex Gao
CMPT 480
2014-12-03
Presentation Outline
• Background information about hearing loss
• Accessibility issues
• Background Noise Recognition and
Reduction
• Frequency shifting
- High Frequency Hearing Loss
• Unidirectional Hearing
- Single-side Hearing Loss
• Implementation for the project
• Demonstration
Hearing Loss
Background InformationAccording to WHO (World Hearth Organization), there are 360 million people
worldwide have disabling hearing loss, but production of hearing aids only
meets less than 10%.
Major Cause for Hearing Loss
• Aging
- People will loss high frequency hearing ability with aging.
• Exposure to noise
• Ear infection
- Noise and infection could cause single-side hearing loss
Background Noise Recognition and
Reduction
• Background noise generally effect all conversation
regardless hear ability
• Recognition
- Ming(2011) introduced a new approach called longest
matching segment (LMS). In the recognition,clean speech
sentences taken from a corpus than compare noisy sentence
with the corpus sentences.
• Reduction
- Signal to noise ration
- Kricos (2014) explained FM technology is helpful
because the talker’s voice can be increased to the level
that higher than other noises, as much as 20 dB higher.
Frequency Shifting
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Lowering Frequency Switching will increase hearing ability for people who have high
frequency hearing loss.
Sources:
– Braida (1979) and her colleagues reviewed studies from 1950 to 1970 and conclude
lowering is only suitable for intensive, long-term and properly designed training
program.
– Jason (2012) introduced Linear Frequency Transposition and Nonlinear Frequency
Compression have shown significant benefits in terms of speech recognition and
detection.
• Linear Frequency Transposition: Linear Frequency Transposition shifts highfrequency sounds to lower frequencies.
• Nonlinear Frequency Compression: Nonlinear frequency compression that is
designed to compress and high frequency information into an adjacent area of
audible hearing.
LFT
NLFC
Unidirectional Hearing – Single-Side
hearing loss
• Convert Stereo sound to mono sound could
help people with single-side hearing loss.
• Sources:
– Neil (2005) currently most assistive devices such
as radios, TVs, iPods, etc. are all stereo devices but
some of them can convert stereo to mono directly
to increase accessibility due to their hardware
capability
Extra Gadgets
• Mono Adapter
• Special designed headphone
• Home Theater
Implementation for the project
The main activities for this project is research for three topics:
Frequency shifting.
Channel Controls.
Noise Reduction.
For each topic there are three areas I was looking for it.
Journal Paper: All the paper I find which related with my
topic will be use on my project to support
my idea and solution.
Video: Video will be used on the ADE to introduce topic.
Software: Software will be used on the ADE to simulate
different type of hearing losses symptoms.
Problems
• Frequency Shifting Section
– Journal Paper
My original research plan was to find the solution for
both low frequency hearing loss and high frequency
hearing loss, but due to the very limit information on
low frequency hearing loss. I have to cut this part off.
• Background Noise and Channel Control Reduction
– Video
• There are not so many good videos dealing with background
noise and stereo to mono. Because of this I have to find
some videos which close to my topic and put it on ADE.
Demonstration - Outline
• 1. Test your ear age
• 2. Stereo vs Mono
• 3. Experience high hearing loss by using
NIOSH hearing Simulation
• 4. Use Signal to noise ratio to increase speech
clarity.
Demonstration
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•
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What’s your ear age?
8Hz
71
10KHz
62
12KHz
55
14KHz
43
16KHz
35
18KHz
21
20KHz
12
Stereo vs Mono
• Game Time.
• Listen to this
Stereo
Stereo - Center
Stereo – Left Only
Stereo – Right Only
Mono
Mono - Center
Mono – Left Only
Mono – Right Only
Demo
• This part will use NISOH to demonstrate
hearing loss.
Conclusion
• This project especially the ADE defiantly can be
used for the future CMPT 480 class. The software
in the ADE can be used to demonstrate different
kind of hearing loss, and also allow user to
experience the specialty of Mono sound which is
extremely important for design sound contents.
• Future work
– Videos (If the ADE could provide more clear and direct
video for the project, this could help user to
understand the content more better.)
•End