Hair-cell damage widens acoustic filter bandwidth, harming speech separation and heightening dissonance perception

Evidence

The effect of the damage though is not just to reduce the threshold but also to increase the bandwidth of our acoustic filters, as shown in idealized form in Figure 2.20. This has two main effects: first, our ability to separate the different components of the sound is impaired, and this will reduce our ability to understand speech or separate desired sound from competing noise. Interestingly, it may well make musical sounds that were consonant more dissonant because of the presence of more than one frequency harmonic in a critical band; this will be discussed in Chapter 3. The second effect is a reduction in the hearing sensitivity, also shown in Figure 2.20, because the enhancement mechanism also increases the amplitude sensitivity of the ear. This effect is more insidious because the effect is less easy to measure and perceive; it manifests itself as a difficulty in interpreting sounds rather than a mere reduction in their perceived level. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 674

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: The idea that hearing damage makes consonant music sound dissonant — a perceptual shift in music appreciation — could seed an article on how hearing loss changes the lived experience of music.
• XREF: Connects to critical-band auditory filters and psychoacoustic masking concepts; also relates to the book’s own Chapter 3 discussion promised here.

Related

• Hearing damage widens acoustic filter bandwidth, impairing speech separation and sensitivity (similarity 0.89)
• Loud music damages cochlear structures in distinct ways producing distinct perceptual deficits (similarity 0.85)
• Cochlear damage produces distinct perceptual deficits depending on which cell type is affected (similarity 0.85)
• Outer hair cell damage widens critical bands and worsens speech-in-noise (similarity 0.84)
• Hearing loss widens critical bands and alters music perception itself (similarity 0.84)
• Outer hair cell damage removes cochlear compressive nonlinearity (similarity 0.83)
• Inner ear hair cell damage accumulates before any measurable hearing threshold rise (similarity 0.83)
• Fiber-type-specific damage produces distinct loudness perception abnormalities. (similarity 0.83)
• Excess noise damages cochlear hair cells through several distinct mechanisms (similarity 0.82)
• Cochlear outer hair cells enable speech amid noise and reverberation (similarity 0.82)
• Outer-hair-cell damage raises high-side but not low-side suppression thresholds. (similarity 0.82)
• Damage location in the ear maps onto specific frequency regions of hearing loss. (similarity 0.82)
• Averaging hearing loss across frequencies can mask serious impairment (similarity 0.82)
• Both conductive and sensorineural damage drastically alters absolute threshold curves. (similarity 0.81)
• Outer hair cell damage destroys the cocktail party effect (similarity 0.81)