The medial superior olive (MSO) is a key auditory brainstem structure that receives binaural inputs and is implicated in processing interaural time disparities used for sound localization. The deaf white cat, a proven model of congenital deafness, was used to examine how deafness and cochlear implantation affected the synaptic organization at this binaural center in the ascending auditory pathw...

Relatively few systems for machine hearing exploit top-down information in source localisation, despite there being clear evidence for top-down (e.g., attentional) effects in biological spatial hearing. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a framework for binaural sound localisation that exploits topdown knowledge about the source spectral characteristics in the acoustic scene. Informat...

Rehabilitative audiology is an area of primary interest in our Auditory Research Laboratory . The research we do under our contract with the Veterans Administration is one of our major efforts in this regard . We have focused both on learning what potentials and limitations hearing aids hold in everyday life and on developing techniques for determining these potentials and limitations at the ti...

Binaural sound localization is usually considered a discrimination task, where interaural time (ITD) and level (ILD) disparities at pure frequency channels are utilized to identify a position of a sound source. In natural conditions binaural circuits are exposed to a stimulation by sound waves originating from multiple, often moving and overlapping sources. Therefore statistics of binaural cues...

Van Wanrooij MM, Van Opstal AJ. Sound localization under perturbed binaural hearing. J Neurophysiol 97: 715–726, 2007. First published October 25, 2006; doi:10.1152/jn.00260.2006. This paper reports on the acute effects of a monaural plug on directional hearing in the horizontal (azimuth) and vertical (elevation) planes of human listeners. Sound localization behavior was tested with rapid heado...

Loudness as the perceptual correlate of sound intensity is formed by some neural processing along the auditory pathway from the cochlea to the cortex. The loudness of a sound is largely determined by its level. Still, there are several other acoustical factors like stimulus bandwidth, duration, modulations, as well as personal factors like, e.g., the individual hearing status, that may affect p...

A multi-signal-processor set-up is introduced that is used for real-time implementation of digital hearing aid algorithms that operate on stereophonic (i.e., binaural) input signals and perform signal processing in the frequency domain. A multiband dynamic compression algorithm was implemented which operates in 24 critical band filter channels, allows for interaction between frequency bands and...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the performance of monaural and binaural beamforming technology with an additional noise reduction algorithm, in cochlear implant recipients. METHOD This experimental study was conducted as a single subject repeated measures design within a large German cochlear implant centre. Twelve experienced users of an Advanced Bionics HiRes90K or CII implant with a Harmony spee...

BACKGROUND A common complaint of patients with (central) auditory processing disorder is difficulty understanding speech in noise. Because binaural hearing improves speech understanding in compromised listening situations, quantifying this ability in different levels of noise may yield a measure with high clinical utility. PURPOSE To examine binaural enhancement (BE) and binaural interaction ...

The most logical solution if a person has a hearing impairment on both ears, seems to be bilateral hearing aid amplification in both ears. Numerous studies have shown the advantages of this fitting strategy. However, there were always some individuals not benefiting from bilateral hearing aids; until recently a neglected group of persons. The first part of the present work examines patterns of ...