Evaluation of hearing devices in 3D audio environments: which 3D audio reproduction system(s)?

When designing new hearing devices (physical designs or algorithms), the quality of the new designs is evaluated almost exclusively through some sort of intelligibility experiment in limited conditions. This provides a better control but dismiss many of the problems that may occur in real life situations. As an alternative, it is possible to synthesize or reproduce realistic 3D audio environments using different loudspeaker- or headphone-based techniques. This talk will present measurements that were conducted in order to choose the most appropriated 3D audio reproduction system for hearing aids evaluation.

Bio:
Laurent Simon received his PhD in psychoacoustics from the University of Surrey in 2011. From 2011 to 2013, he studied audio source separation at INRIA, Rennes, before working on perceptual evaluation of binaural audio reproduction techniques at LIMSI until 2015. Laurent Simon is now doing a postdoc at the ORL Klinik of the University Hospital Zürich, where he studies the spatial auditory perception of patients using hearing aids, focusing on localization and distance perception.