On the influence of sensorineural hearing loss on the pitch strength of bandpass noise

Abstract

The psychoacoustic measure “pitch strength” describes a sound’s tonality, i.e., the strength of the tonal sensation evoked by the sound on a scale from weak to strong. For normal-hearing listeners, it was shown in the literature that the pitch strength of bandpass noises decreased with increasing bandwidth when the center frequency was fixed and increased with increasing center frequency when the noise bandwidth was fixed. In this study, pitch strength of bandpass noise was measured in normal-hearing listeners. For this, stimuli were generated using two different methods of filtering. Results showed some deviation between both methods. One method could reproduce results from the literature best. After this, pitch strength was measured in participants with sensorineural hearing loss. Results were compared to results on pitch strength in normal-hearing listeners using the same filtering method. Hearing-impaired participants showed a reduced dynamic range in the perception of pitch strength of bandpass noise. A pathological widening of the auditory filters and deficits in the use of information from the temporal fine structure were discussed as possible reasons.