The higher cultural and social level of people affected by hypoacusis, leads to a growth of the request of high quality hearing aid systems: to achieve this quality enhancement, the evolution of technologies in the hearing aid and audiometric fields is moving towards the digital world. Even if digital audio prosthesis are not new, the algorithms for the enhancement of speech quality and intelli...

BACKGROUND The noises in modern soundscapes continue to increase and are a major origin for annoyance. For a hearing-impaired person, a hearing aid is often beneficial, but noise and annoying sounds can result in non-use of the hearing aid, temporary or permanently. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to identify annoying sounds in a daily soundscape for hearing-aid users. DESIGN A diar...

A question gaining widespread interest in education today is ‘how can learning tasks be structured to encourage creative thinking in the classroom?’ This has a number of implications for the design of educational software. Numerous scholars have suggested that the processes of ‘learning’ and ‘creativity’ share many similarities. Extending upon this a generative framework of creative learning is...

The ocean soundscape of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) has not been well-studied, although it is an important habitat for marine mammals, including sperm and beaked whales, many dolphin species, and a potentially endangered baleen whale species. The GOM is also home to high levels of hydrocarbon exploration and extraction, heavily used commercial shipping ports, and significant fishery industry activ...

This research focuses on the generation of soundscapes using unstructured sound databases for the sonification of virtual environments. A generalized methodology for design based on soundscape categorization, perceptual discrimination of sources and media design principles is proposed, with the underlying principle of the composition of a source and a textural layer within any soundscape. A gen...

The purpose of this work was to investigate the sound environment of public parks using a soundscape study model that analyzes not only noise but also all the types of sound of a given area, as well as other environmental factors. To this end, acoustic measurements were made in the parks under study and interviews were held with their frequent visitors. Noise measurements were conducted in 55 p...