3-3 Voice, Emotion and Hearing

since 2017

The main goal of hearing aids is to facilitate the communication of the hearing impaired by improving the speech intelligibility of their interlocutors for all possible acoustic circumstances. It is also to promote the perception of the surrounding sound environment: noises, music, speakers (television, computer, tablet), acoustic signals …

These two aspects are the subject of constant and considerable research and development. There is no doubt that the future promises us more and more efficient equipment that will fully meet these constraints.

If there is no doubt that auditory recognition of individuals and sound sources works, what about the sound quality of hearing aids ?

In particular, does the wearing of a hearing aid make it possible to feel the emotion of a speaker properly ? Does music provide as much emotion as for a normal hearer ?

The research enterprise will attempt to answer the first of these last two questions.

For this purpose, a professional actor played the same text with several emotions, and the recordings were listened to by normo- and hearing-impaired people in order for them to perform a classification.

The experiment is being analyzed and the results analyzed. Coming soon the conclusions of this first test study