Auditory perception constructs auditory images by means of organizing principles that are collectively referred to as Auditory Scene Analysis (ASA). Diverse forms of hearing impairments are shown to have detrimental effects on ASA, which arguably takes its largest toll in the form of impaired speech intelligibility in noisy environments. In recent work of my team, we have shown that hearing impairments similarly degrade musical scene analysis (MSA). This talk will give an overview of these studies testing normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners (with and without hearing aids). Using natural musical excerpts, the MSA tasks probed the ability to hear out target sounds in multi-instrument musical mixtures. Results consistently indicate negative effects of hearing impairment on MSA abilities. Yet, the comparison of MSA abilities and sound quality ratings suggests using multifaceted approaches to characterizing listening abilities and preferences of listeners with diverse hearing profiles.

Prof. Kai Siedenburg studied mathematics and musicology in Berlin, Berkeley, and Vienna and obtained a PhD from McGill University, Montreal, in 2016. Subsequently, Kai served as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oldenburg. Since 2020, Kai has directed the Oldenburg Music Perception and Processing Lab as a Freigeist fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation. Since 2023, he has been a professor of Communication Acoustics at Graz University of Technology. Kai is the co-editor of the 2019 Springer Handbook of Auditory Research volume on “Timbre: Acoustics, Perception, and Cognition” and in 2020 received the Lothar Cremer Award from the German Acoustical Society in Acoustics. Since 2022, he has been a principal investigator in the DFG Collaborative Research Centre “Hearing Acoustics” and an elected member of Die Junge Akademie. Since 2023, he has been an associate editor for The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Musical Acoustics section).