Abstract
Exposure to high-level music produces several physiological changes in the auditory system that lead to a variety of perceptual effects. Damage to the outer hair cells within the cochlea leads to a loss of sensitivity to weak sounds, loudness recruitment (a more rapid than normal growth of loudness with increasing sound level), and reduced frequency selectivity. Damage to inner hair cells and/or synapses leads to degeneration of neurons in the auditory nerve and to a reduced flow of information to the brain. This leads to poorer auditory discrimination and may contribute to reduced sensitivity to the temporal fine structure of sounds and to poor pitch perception. Hearing aids compensate for the effects of threshold elevation and loudness recruitment via multichannel amplitude compression, but they do not compensate for reduced frequency selectivity or loss of inner hair cells/synapses/neurons. Multichannel compression can impair some aspects of the perception of music, such as the ability to hear out one instrument or voice from a mixture. The limited frequency range and irregular frequency response of most hearing aids is associated with poor sound quality for music. Finally, systems for reducing acoustic feedback can have undesirable side effects when listening to music.
Highlights
The vibration pattern around the peak is amplified and sharpened by an active mechanism that depends on the integrity of the outer hair cells (OHCs); these form 3–5 rows running along the length of the basilar membrane (BM)
The vibration is detected via the inner hair cells (IHCs), which form a single row running along the length of the BM
(4) In a hearing aid with fast-acting automatic gain control (AGC) in many channels, the spectrum is flattened. This compounds difficulties produced by the reduced frequency selectivity that is associated with OHC damage [2]. (5) When the input signal to the AGC system is a mixture of different voices or instruments, fast-acting compression introduces “cross-modulation” between the voices/instruments because the time-varying gain of the compressor is applied to the mixture [49, 52, 56]
Summary
The vibration pattern around the peak is amplified and sharpened by an active mechanism that depends on the integrity of the outer hair cells (OHCs); these form 3–5 rows running along the length of the BM. The vibration is detected via the inner hair cells (IHCs), which form a single row running along the length of the BM. Electrical currents flowing through the IHCs lead to a release of neurotransmitter that in turn leads to activity in the neurons that make up the auditory nerve, via the synapses of these neurons on the IHCs. Exposure to high-level sounds, including music, can lead to permanent damage to or dysfunction of the OHCs, the IHCs, the synapses between the IHCs and neurons, and the neurons [1,2,3]. The perceptual consequences of each of these different forms of damage are described . It should be noted that, usually, more than one of these forms of damage is involved [4, 5]
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