gms | German Medical Science

22. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Audiologie

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Audiologie e. V.

06.03. - 09.03.2019, Heidelberg

Music simplification for cochlear implant users through harmonic/percussive sound separation and spectral complexity reduction

Meeting Abstract

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  • presenting/speaker Benjamin Lentz - Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Institut für Kommunikationsakustik, Bochum, Deutschland
  • Anil Nagathil - Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Institut für Kommunikationsakustik, Bochum, Deutschland
  • Johannes Gauer - Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Institut für Kommunikationsakustik, Bochum, Deutschland
  • Rainer Martin - Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Institut für Kommunikationsakustik, Bochum, Deutschland

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Audiologie e.V.. 22. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Audiologie. Heidelberg, 06.-09.03.2019. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2019. Doc142

doi: 10.3205/19dga142, urn:nbn:de:0183-19dga1423

Veröffentlicht: 28. November 2019

© 2019 Lentz et al.
Dieser Artikel ist ein Open-Access-Artikel und steht unter den Lizenzbedingungen der Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (Namensnennung). Lizenz-Angaben siehe http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.


Gliederung

Text

Introduction: While a cochlear implant (CI) can restore the speech intelligibility in patients with profound hearing loss to a high degree the perception of music is deteriorated and often described as unpleasant. Especially pitch and timbre information cannot be reproduced with sufficient detail by CIs. Temporal features like rhythm however are perceived almost similar to normal-hearing listeners [1]. In this work we therefore propose a signal processing method to enhance music signals for a more accurate and pleasant perception of music. The method combines the separation of harmonic and percussive elements [2] with a previously introduced spectral complexity reduction [3].

Methods: An algorithm is used for the separation of harmonic and percussive components of the input music signal [4]. The harmonic signal part is simplified to the most essential spectral components by applying a principal component analysis to the spectrum followed by a reconstruction using the first K most important principal components only [3]. The percussive signal part, which contains important rhythmic information, is presented to the listener unmodified and mixed with the simplified harmonic parts. The proposed processing scheme was evaluated and compared to other recently developed methods [2], [3] in a listening test with normal hearing listeners and the use of a noise-exited bandpass vocoder. Here unprocessed popular music pieces as well as different processed versions were presented to the listeners to be rated comparatively in terms of distinctness of drums, distinctness of melody, and the overall impression.

Results: All criteria of the listening test showed better ratings (mostly significant) for the proposed processing compared to the unprocessed music and the other processing schemes.

Conclusion:The combination of harmonic/percussive sound separation and spectral complexity reduction has the potential to improve the perception of both drums and melody and thus the pleasantness of popular music for CI users.


References

1.
McDermott HJ. Music perception with cochlear implants: a review. Trends Amplif. 2004;8(2):49-82.
2.
Buyens W, Dijk BV, Wouters J, Moonen M. A Harmonic/Percussive Sound Separation Based Music Pre-Processing Scheme for Cochlear Implant Users. In: Proc. European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO). 2013. pp. 1-5.
3.
Nagathil A, Weihs C, Neumann K, Martin R. Spectral complexity reduction of music signals based on frequency-domain reduced-rank approximations: An evaluation with cochlear implant listeners. J Acoust Soc Am. 2017 09;142(3):1219. DOI: 10.1121/1.5000484 Externer Link
4.
Driedger J Müller M, Disch S. Extending Harmonic-Percussive Separation of Audio Signals. In: Proc. Int. Soc. For Music Information Retrieval Conf. (ISMIR). 2014. pp. 611-6.