To Örebro University

Background: The noises in modern soundscapes continue to increase and are a major origin for annoyance. For a hearing-impaired person, a hearing aid is often beneficial, but noise and annoying sounds can result in non-use of the hearing aid, temporary or permanently.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to identify annoying sounds in a daily soundscape for hearing-aid users.

Design: A diary was used to collect data where the participants answered four questions per day about annoying sounds in the daily soundscape over a two-week period.

Study sample: Sixty adult hearing-aid users. Results: Of the 60 participants 91% experienced annoying sounds daily when using hearing aids. The annoying sound mentioned by most users, was verbal human sounds, followed by other daily sound sources categorized into 17 groups such as TV/radio, vehicles, and machine tools. When the hearing-aid users were grouped in relation to age, hearing loss, gender, hearing-aid experience, and type of signal processing used in their hearing aids, small and only few significant differences were found when comparing their experience of annoying sounds.

Conclusions: The results indicate that hearing-aid users often experience annoying sounds and improved clinical fitting routines may reduce the problem.

OBJECTIVE: Sounds in the daily environment may cause loudness and annoyance. The present study investigated the perception of loudness and annoyance for eight different sounds present in a daily sound environment and at nine different levels varying by ±20 dB around the recorded level. The outcomes were related to tests of participants' auditory and cognitive abilities.

DESIGN: The participants undertook auditory and working memory (WM) tests prior to ratings of everyday sounds previously shown to be disturbing for persons with hearing impairment (hearing aid users).

STUDY SAMPLE: Twenty-one participants aged between 24 and 71 years, with normal hearing threshold levels.

RESULTS: Both perceived loudness and annoyance were primarily driven by the sound level. Sounds emitted from paper were rated as having greater loudness and being more annoying than the other sound sources at the same sound level. Auditory and cognitive abilities did not influence the perception of loudness and annoyance.

CONCLUSIONS: Loudness and annoyance ratings were mainly driven by sound level. Expectations of a sound seemed to influence the assessment of loudness and annoyance while auditory performance and WM capacity showed no influence on the ratings.