Year: 2013
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Professional musicians have to deal with two main problems when wearing hearing protection devices (HPDs): the occlusion effect and the isolation effect. The occlusion effect is an unnatural and annoying perception of one's own voice when wearing HPDs. It will affect all musicians whose instrument induces vibrations to the skull, including singers and musicians whose instrument is pressed against any part of the head. The isolation effect is the unnatural sensation of being isolated from a given sound environment. It is caused by a non-uniform attenuation of the HPD over the audio spectrum and the absence of compensation for equal loudness contours. These two effects are highly unfavorable to the musicians' auditory perception and compromise their capacity to perform to the best of their abilities for their audience. This paper presents an active HPD for musicians, providing occlusion effect reduction and isolation effect compensation. Preliminary performance of the occlusion effect reduction system is presented and discussed.
DOI: 10.1121/1.4800066
Authors: Antoine Bernier, Jérémie Voix
Institutions: École de Technologie Supérieure, Université du Québec
Language: English
Topic: Speech and Audio Processing
Subfield: Signal Processing
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Mitacs
OpenAlex ID: W4233938226