Signal processing, hearing aid design, and the psychoacoustic turing test

A psychoacoustic Turing Test is proposed as a means for assessing hearing aid signal processing: a hearing aid is considered successful if the aided impaired listener is indistinguishable from a normal hearing listener using psychoacoustic measures. Forward masking, loudness summation, and frequency resolution tests are examined within this construct. The performance of hearing impaired listeners using multiband compression is predicted and compared to the performance of normal hearing listeners. The results provide a measure of hearing aid performance and a method for selecting between different signal processing designs.