Proceedings of the 11th Convention of the
European Acoustics Association
Forum Acusticum / EuroNoise 2025


Málaga, Spain
June 23 - 26, 2025





Session: A14.04 Spatial hearing: modeling and applications
Date: Wednesday 25 June 2025
Time: 09:20
Title: Towards predicting binaural audio quality in listeners with normal and impaired hearing
Author(s): Thomas Biberger
Stephan Ewert
Pages: 3399-3404
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.61782/fa.2025.0909
PDF: https://dael.euracoustics.org/confs/fa2025/data/articles/000909.pdf
Conference proceedings
Abstract

Eurich et al. (2024) recently introduced the computationally efficient monaural and binaural audio quality model (eMoBi-Q). This model integrates both monaural and binaural auditory features and has been validated across six audio datasets encompassing quality ratings for music and speech, processed via algorithms commonly employed in modern hearing devices (e.g., acoustic transparency, feedback cancellation or binaural beamforming) or presented via loudspeakers. In the current study, we expand eMoBi-Q to account for the perceptual effects of sensorineural hearing loss (HL) on audio quality. For this, the model was extended by a nonlinear auditory filterbank. Given that altered loudness perception is a prevalent issue among listeners with hearing impairment, our goal is to incorporate loudness as a sub-dimension for predicting audio quality in both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired populations. While predicting loudness itself is important in the context of loudness-based hearing aid fitting, loudness as audio quality sub-measure may be helpful for the selection of reliable auditory features in hearing impaired listeners. The parameters of the filterbank and subsequent processing stages were informed by the physiologically-based (binaural) loudness model proposed by Pieper et al. (2018). This study presents and discusses the initial implementation of the extended binaural quality model.