Adaptive Sound Field Synthesis for Hearing Aid Research – ASFHEAR

Hearing loss affects a growing number of people, and has a huge social and economic impact. It is essential to provide hearing-impaired people with adequate hearing aids so that they can participate fully in society. To achieve this, hearing aid research area requires high-performance diagnostic tools. The ASFHEAR project aims to provide one such tool: an adaptive sound field synthesis system capable of perfectly reproducing a target sound pressure field in space and time, using an array of loudspeakers. This tool is essential for reproducing acoustic environments where hearing aids still do not function optimally, for example for speech intelligibility in rooms with poor acoustics. To bring this project to fruition, ASFHEAR is focusing on providing concrete solutions to the current challenges of physical sound field synthesis. The adaptive synthesis algorithms developed in ASFHEAR are able to correct defects in the playback system, by equalizing the acoustic responses of the loudspeakers or compensating for reflections in the playback room. Similarly, adaptive filtering is performed in real-time to take into account changes in operating conditions during system use, such as temperature changes, furniture displacement or listener head movements. The experimental set-up proposed by ASFHEAR will be used for speech intelligibility tests in reconstructed realistic acoustic environments.