Hearing aid evaluation for music: Accounting for acoustical variability of music stimuli

Music is an important signal class for hearing aids, and musical genre is often used as a descriptor for stimulus selection. However, little research has systematically investigated the acoustical properties of musical genres with respect to hearing aid amplification. Here, extracts from a combination of two comprehensive music databases were acoustically analyzed. Considerable overlap in acoustic descriptor space between genres emerged. By simulating hearing aid processing, it was shown that effects of amplification regarding dynamic range compression and spectral weighting differed across musical genres, underlining the critical role of systematic stimulus selection for research on music and hearing aids.