Music Perception Analysis on Hearing Impaired Listeners

A hearing aid designed for speech is not optimally set for music. Hearing impaired persons suffer from many problems such as difficulty in understanding melodies, distinguishing timbre, meter, harmony and other musical features. In the proposed experiment, a music perception test with components namely, meter, timbre, texture, fluctuation pattern and melody perception in noise is used for the evaluation. The test is performed on normal hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. The test is conducted on 20 respondents. A statistical analysis is performed using Nalysis Of VAriance (ANOVA) test. The results show that hearing-impaired participants (HI) have lower perception in understanding meter, musical texture and melody in noise than normal hearing participants (NH). It is observed that the perception variation of timbre and modulation is less between both the categories as compared to other attributes.