The influence of TTS on the perception of spectrum changes by people with hearing losses

The paper presents the results of a study on the effect of Temporary Threshold Shift on detecting changes in the spectrum of musical signals for 3 frequency ranges. The experiment involved 20 subjects, half of whom were otologically healthy, while 10 subjects had hearing losses of 30 – 40 dB for higher frequencies. All listeners were subjected to 1-hour exposure to loud music. The results of the experiment showed that subjects with hearing losses had a greater spread of variation detection results compared to healthy subjects. In addition, small changes in the spectrum in the higher frequency range are not effectively detected by people with hearing loss. For other frequency ranges and larger spectral changes, the differences in change detection for the two groups of listeners are much smaller