Upon asking what kind of problems hearing aid users have when listening to music, most of the answers will be that some instruments are too loud, some too soft, or that it is all one big mush. The field of musical scene analysis (MSA) investigates the human perceptual ability to organize complex musical structures, such as the sound mixtures of an orchestra, into meaningful lines or streams from its individual instruments or sections. Many studies have already been performed on various MSA-tasks for humans as it bears the key to better understand music perception and help improve the enjoyment of music in hearing impaired people. For example, Siedenburg et al. (2020, 2021) demonstrated the effect of instrumentation on the ability to track instruments in artificial and natural musical mixtures. Bürgel et al. (2021) showed that lead vocals in pop music especially attract attention of the listener. Furthermore, Hake et al. (2023) presented results of MSA tests that differed depending on the participant’s level of hearing loss. However, there are still many open questions. One key question concerns the acoustical features underpinning MSA in natural music the human ear and brain use to selectively filter out single instruments/voices from sound mixtures. The goal of my PhD research is to create a signal-based model that accounts for response behavior of human listeners when asked if a sound from a target instrument can be heard in a musical mixture. I seek to analyze methods of the auditory apparatus to process music and study the ways in which they are hindered by sensorineural hearing loss. As a starting point I will be using existing models for speech perception and audio quality that use features such as linear and non-linear filterbanks, modulation filterbanks, and envelope extraction that simulate the auditory processing. Drawing from previous experiments, model performance is assessed by evaluating fit to human performance. The resulting model might then be used to test algorithms to improve selective hearing in music and provide a detailed picture on how humans perceive music.

References

• Bürgel, M., Picinali, L., & Siedenburg, K. (2021). Listening in the Mix: Lead Vocals Robustly Attract Auditory Attention in Popular Music. Frontiers in Psychology.
• Hake, R., Bürgel, M., Nguyen, N. K., Greasley, A., Müllensiefen, D., & Siedenburg, K. (2023). Development of an adaptive test of musical scene analysis abilities for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. Behavior Research Methods.
• Siedenburg, K., Goldmann, K., & van de Par, S. (2021). Tracking Musical Voices in Bach’s The Art of the Fugue: Timbral Heterogeneity Differentially Affects Younger Normal-Hearing Listeners and Older Hearing-Aid Users. Frontiers in Psychology.
• Siedenburg, K., Röttges, S., Wagener, K. C., & Hohmann, V. (2020). Can You Hear Out the Melody? Testing Musical Scene Perception in Young Normal-Hearing and Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners. Trends in Hearing.