title: Dead regions and noisiness of pure tones.
abstract: Some hearing-impaired subjects report pure tones as sounding highly distorted and noise-like. We assessed whether such reports indicate that the tone frequency falls inside a dead region (DR). Nine hearing-impaired and four normally hearing subjects rated pure tones on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 indicates clear tone and 7 indicates noise. A white noise was presented as a reference for a sound that should be rated as 7. Stimuli covered the whole audible range of frequencies and levels. The noisiness ratings were, on average, higher for hearing-impaired subjects than for normally hearing subjects. For the former, the ratings were not markedly different for tones with frequencies just outside or inside a DR. However, ratings always exceeded 3 for tones falling more than 1.5 octaves inside a DR. The results indicate that judgement of a tone as sounding noise-like does not reliably indicate that the tone frequency falls in a DR. Both normally hearing and hearing-impaired subjects rated 0.125 kHz and 12 kHz tones as somewhat noise-like, independently of the existence of a DR.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK.
authors.forename: Martina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Huss
authors.forename: Brian C J
authors.initials: BC
authors.lastname: Moore
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001301:Audiometry, Pure-Tone; D001309:Auditory Threshold / Q000502:physiology; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003051:Cochlea / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006199:Hair Cells, Auditory, Inner / Q000503:physiopathology; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D009622:Noise; D011571:Psychoacoustics