Lyric intelligibility of musical segments for older individuals with hearing loss

Understanding lyrics is a major barrier to enjoying music for people with hearing loss. To improve lyric understanding through machine-learning, metrics need to be informed by the experiences of the target population. Currently, there are no data on lyric-recall ability of older individuals with hearing loss. Twelve older participants with mostly mild-sloping hearing loss listened to and recalled 100 segments of popular music that varied in genre, duration and word count. In each trial, participants heard a randomly chosen segment twice with a 5-s interstimulus interval over headphones at an A-weighted level of 65 dB plus individualised frequency-dependent nonlinear gain. The proportion of words heard correctly varied greatly across samples, from 0 to 100%, and varied as a function of genre, similar to past studies with different populations. Individual intelligibility across samples was correlated with age; sample intelligibility across individuals, however, was not correlated with word count or rate. Improving sung-lyric intelligibility is a different challenge from spoken-speech enhancement for those with hearing loss. Not only does the enhancement need to be considered within the overall enjoyment of the music, but the variation in results—as seen in the current study—reflects variations in genre, orchestration and vocal quality in sung music.