Scientific Article

Near-ear sound pressure level distribution in everyday life considering the user’s own voice and privacy

Jade University of Applied Sciences, Institute of Hearing Technology and Audiology, and Cluster of Excellence “Hearing4all”, 26121 Oldenburg, Germany

^* Corresponding author: jule.pohlhausen@jade-hs.de

Received: 6 October 2021
Accepted: 22 August 2022

Abstract

Recently, exploring acoustic conditions of people in their everyday environments has drawn a lot of attention. One of the most important and disturbing sound sources is the test participant’s own voice. This contribution proposes an algorithm to determine the own-voice audio segments (OVS) for blocks of 125 ms and a method for measuring sound pressure levels (SPL) without violating privacy laws. The own voice detection (OVD) algorithm here developed is based on a machine learning algorithm and a set of acoustic features that do not allow for speech reconstruction. A manually labeled real-world recording of one full day showed reliable and robust detection results. Moreover, the OVD algorithm was applied to 13 near-ear recordings of hearing-impaired participants in an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study. The analysis shows that the grand mean percentage of predicted OVS during one day was approx. 10% which corresponds well to other published data. These OVS had a small impact on the median SPL over all data. However, for short analysis intervals, significant differences up to 30 dB occurred in the measured SPL, depending on the proportion of OVS and the SPL of the background noise.