Brian C J Moore

University of Cambridge | Cam · Department of Psychology

Objective: To evaluate the psychometric properties of the Tinnitus Impact Questionnaire (TIQ), whose questions focus on assessing the impact of tinnitus on the patient's day to day activities, mood, and sleep, and not on hearing difficulties. Design: This was a retrospective cross-sectional study. Study sample: Data were included for 172 adult...

An intense low-frequency tone can affect the perception of amplitude modulation (AM) applied to a high-frequency carrier. Here, thresholds for detecting AM of a 3000-Hz carrier were measured in the presence of a 50-Hz pure tone at 91 dB SPL. When the carrier was presented at 20 dB sensation level (SL), the thresholds were higher than in the absence...

This paper evaluates the proportion and the audiological and other characteristics of patients with symptoms of misophonia among a population seeking help for tinnitus and/or hyperacusis at an audiology clinic (n = 257). To assess such symptoms, patients were asked “over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following pro...

The effects of age and mild hearing loss over the extended high-frequency (EHF) range from 9000 to 16 000 Hz on speech perception and auditory stream segregation were assessed using four groups: (1) young with normal hearing threshold levels (HTLs) over both the conventional and EHF range; (2) older with audiograms matched to those for group 1; (3)...

Background The Audiology Department at the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust (RSFT), United Kingdom, developed a patient experience questionnaire (PEQ) to assess and compare patients' experiences of attending a wide range of appointments (e.g., hearing assessment, hearing aid fitting, hearing aid review, tinnitus therapy, balance assessment, and ba...

Current research in the field of psychoacoustics is mostly conducted using a computer to generate and present the stimuli and to collect the responses of the subject. However, writing the computer software to do this is time-consuming and requires technical expertise that is not possessed by many would-be researchers. Professor Aleksander Sek and P...

Background: Hyperacusis can be defined as an intolerance of certain everyday sounds, which are perceived as too loud or uncomfortable and which cause significant distress and impairment in the individual's day-to-day activities. It is important to assess symptoms of sound intolerance and their impact on the patient's life, so as to evaluate the ne...

The distance of sound sources relative to the body can be estimated using acoustic level and direct-to-reverberant ratio cues. However, the ability to do this may differ for sounds that are in front compared to behind the listener. One reason for this is that vision, which plays an important role in calibrating auditory distance cues early in life,...

Visual spatial information plays an important role in calibrating auditory space. Blindness results in deficits in a number of auditory abilities, which have been explained in terms of the hypothesis that visual information is needed to calibrate audition. When judging the size of a novel room when only auditory cues are available, normally sighted...

It is traditionally believed that the effects of exposure to noise cease once the exposure itself has ceased. If this is the case, exposure to noise relatively early in life, for example during military service, should not affect the subsequent progression of hearing loss. However, recent data from studies using animals suggest that noise exposure...

Some of the problems experienced by users of hearing aids (HAs) when listening to music are relevant to cochlear implants (CIs). One problem is related to the high peak levels (up to 120 dB SPL) that occur in live music. Some HAs and CIs overload at such levels, because of the limited dynamic range of the microphones and analogue-to-digital convert...

This paper makes recommendations for the diagnosis and quantification of noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) in a medico-legal context. A distinction is made between NIHL produced by: steady broadband noise, as occurs in some factories; more impulsive factory sounds, such as hammering; noise exposure during military service, which can involve very hi...

The highest frequency for which the temporal fine structure (TFS) of a sinewave can be compared across ears varies between listeners with an upper limit of about 1400 Hz for young normal-hearing adults (YNHA). In this study, binaural TFS sensitivity was investigated for 63 typically developing children, aged 5 years, 6 months to 9 years, 4 months u...

Background and Purpose The aim of this study was to assess whether the severity of tinnitus, as measured using ratings of tinnitus loudness, annoyance, and effect on life, was influenced by the lockdown related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Research Design This was a retrospective study. Study Sample The data for 105 consecut...

The lower limit of pitch (LLP) perception was explored for pure tones, sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (SAM) tones with a carrier frequency of 125 Hz, and trains of 125-Hz tone pips, using an adaptive procedure to estimate the lowest repetition rate for which a tonal/humming quality was heard. The LLP was similar for the three stimulus types, aver...

An analysis is presented of the audiograms, obtained using Telephonics TDH39 headphones (Huntington, NY), of 80 men claiming compensation for noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) sustained during military service. A comparison with an independent database of audiograms collected using other headphones suggested that no adjustment was needed to the hea...

When developing new vehicles that are to be operated in existing background noise, such as electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOLs) in cities, a sound design goal should be to minimize the loudness in the given background noise. Rotorcraft sounds are characterised by their pulses, and the choice of rotor size and number allows to va...

When vision is unavailable, auditory level and reverberation cues provide important spatial information regarding the environment, such as the size of a room. We investigated how room-size estimates were affected by stimulus type, level, and reverberation. In Experiment 1, 15 blindfolded participants estimated room size after performing a distance...

Traditional methods for predicting the intelligibility of speech in the presence of noise inside a vehicle, such as the Articulation Index (AI), the Speech Intelligibility Index (SII), and the Speech Transmission Index (STI), are not accurate, probably because they do not take binaural listening into account; the signals reaching the two ears can d...

Until recently, a commonly held view was that blindness resulted in enhanced auditory abilities, underpinned by the beneficial effects of cross-modal neuroplasticity. This viewpoint has been challenged by studies showing that blindness results in poorer performance for some auditory spatial tasks. It is now clear that visual loss does not result in...

The threshold for detecting amplitude modulation (AM) of a sinusoidal or noise carrier is elevated when the signal AM is preceded by masker AM applied to the same carrier. This effect, called AM forward masking, shows selectivity in the AM domain, consistent with the existence of a modulation filter bank (MFB). In this paper we explore the effect o...

This paper reviews and re-analyses data from published studies on the effects of noise exposure on the progression of hearing loss once noise exposure has ceased, focusing particularly on noise exposure during military service. The data are consistent with the idea that such exposure accelerates the progression of hearing loss at frequencies where...

Frequency selectivity in the amplitude modulation (AM) domain has been demonstrated using both simultaneous AM masking and forward AM masking. This has been explained using the concept of a modulation filter bank (MFB). Here, we assessed whether the MFB occurs before or after the point of binaural interaction in the auditory pathway by using forwar...

Moore [(2020). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 148, 884–894] proposed a method for the diagnosis of hearing loss produced by noise exposure during military service (denoted M-NIHL) based on the audiogram. This letter characterizes the sensitivity and specificity of the method, based on 116 ears of men claiming compensation for M-NIHL and 244 ears of an age-mat...

A deep recurrent neural network (RNN) for reducing transient sounds was developed and its effects on subjective speech intelligibility and listening comfort were investigated. The RNN was trained using sentences spoken with different accents and corrupted by transient sounds, using the clean speech as the target. It was tested using sentences spoke...

Background and Purpose The aim of this study was to assess the incidence of the perception of tinnitus in dreams among patients seeking help for tinnitus and/or hyperacusis and to assess whether this is related to the severity of tinnitus and/or hyperacusis. Research Design This was a retrospective study. Study Sample The data for 148 consecutive a...

Objectives: The aim was to assess the internal consistency and convergent and discriminant validity of a new questionnaire for hyperacusis, the Inventory of Hyperacusis Symptoms (IHS; Greenberg & Carlos 2018), using a clinical population. Design: This was a retrospective study. Data were gathered from the records of 100 consecutive patients who...

Lau et al. [J. Neurosci. 37, 9013–9021 (2017)] showed that discrimination of the fundamental frequency (F0) of complex tones with components in a high-frequency region was better than predicted from the optimal combination of information from the individual harmonics. The predictions depend on the assumption that psychometric functions for frequenc...

Purpose : Total blindness enhances a range of auditory abilities and degrades others. However what is not known is the severity of visual loss needed for these changes in performance to occur. We assessed the accuracy of absolute distance perception in normally sighted controls and participants with a range of severities of visual loss for speech,...

Objective: The Audiology Department at the Royal Surrey County Hospital usually offers face-to-face audiologist-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for tinnitus rehabilitation. During COVID-19 lockdown, patients were offered telehealth CBT via video using a web-based platform. This study evaluated the proportion of patients who took up t...

No PDF available ABSTRACT People whose hearing is damaged by exposure to intense sounds, typically in noisy factories or during military service, often claim compensation. The most common complaint of such people is difficulty in understanding speech when background sounds are present. However, because direct measures of the intelligibility if spee...

The diagnosis and quantification of noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) in a medico-legal context are usually based on the pattern of hearing loss that is typically associated with long-term exposure to steady broadband noises, such as occur in noisy factories. Evidence is reviewed showing that this pattern is not typical for hearing loss produced by...

Objective: The objective was to assess the effect of age on thresholds for the TEN(HL) test for diagnosing dead regions in the cochlea, as a function of signal frequency and TEN(HL) level. Design: The TEN(HL) test was administered twice for each ear of each participant (in two separate sessions) using signal frequencies from 0.5 to 4 kHz and TEN(HL...

The link between lifetime noise exposure and temporal processing abilities was investigated for 45 normal-hearing participants, recruited from a population of undergraduate students, aged 18 to 23 years. A self-report instrument was employed to assess the amount of neuropathic noise (here defined as sounds with levels exceeding approximately 80 dBA...

Within the cochlea, broadband sounds like speech and music are filtered into a series of narrowband signals, each with a relatively slowly varying envelope (ENV) imposed on a rapidly oscillating carrier (the temporal fine structure, TFS). Information about ENV is conveyed by the timing and short-term rate of action potentials in the auditory nerve...

Blindness leads to substantial enhancements in many auditory abilities, and deficits in others. It is unknown how severe visual losses need to be before changes in auditory abilities occur, or whether the relationship between severity of visual loss and changes in auditory abilities is proportional and systematic. Here we show that greater severity...

Although vision is important for calibrating auditory spatial perception, it only provides information about frontal sound sources. Previous studies of blind and sighted people support the idea that azimuthal spatial bisection in frontal space requires visual calibration, while detection of a change in azimuth (minimum audible angle, MAA) does not....

Time-efficient hearing tests are important in both clinical practice and research studies. Bayesian active learning (BAL) methods were first proposed in the 1990s. We developed BAL methods for measuring the audiogram, conducting notched-noise tests, determination of the edge frequency of a dead region (fe), and estimating equal-loudness contours. T...

The “time-varying loudness (TVL)” model calculates “instantaneous loudness” every 1 ms, and this is used to generate predictions of short-term loudness, the loudness of a short segment of sound such as a word in a sentence, and of long-term loudness, the loudness of a longer segment of sound, such as a whole sentence. The calculation of instantaneo...

The use of a large number of amplitude-compression channels in hearing aids has potential advantages, such as the ability to compensate for variations in loudness recruitment across frequency and provide appropriate frequency-response shaping. However, sound quality and speech intelligibility could be adversely affected due to reduction of spectro-...

The highest spectral ripple density at which the discrimination of ripple glide direction was possible (STRtdir task) was assessed for one-octave wide (narrowband) stimuli with center frequencies of 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz and for a broadband stimulus. A pink noise lowpass filtered at the lower edge frequency of the rippled-noise stimuli was u...

Current research in the field of psychoacoustics is mostly conducted using a computer to generate and present the stimuli and to collect the responses of the subject. However, writing the computer software to do this is time-consuming and requires technical expertise that is not possessed by many would-be researchers. We have developed a software p...

The quality of an audio device depends on how accurately the device transmits the properties of the sound source to the ear(s) of the listener. Two types of ``distortion'' can occur: (1) ``Linear'' distortion, namely a deviation of the frequency response from the ``target'' response; (2) Nonlinear distortion, which is characterised by frequency com...

The efferent system may control the gain of the cochlea and thereby influence frequency selectivity. This effect can be assessed using contralateral stimulation (CS) applied to the ear opposite to that used to assess frequency selectivity. The effect of CS may be stronger for musicians than for nonmusicians. To assess whether this was the case, psy...

The “time-varying loudness” (TVL) model of Glasberg and Moore calculates “instantaneous loudness” every 1 ms, and this is used to generate predictions of short-term loudness, the loudness of a short segment of sound, such as a word in a sentence, and of long-term loudness, the loudness of a longer segment of sound, such as a whole sentence. The cal...

Time-efficient hearing tests are important in both clinical practice and research studies. This particularly applies to notched-noise tests, which are rarely done in clinical practice because of the time required. Auditory-filter shapes derived from notched-noise data may be useful for diagnosis of the cause of hearing loss and for fitting of heari...

Objective The aim of this study was to evaluate the views of patients who completed audiologist-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) about (a) the effectiveness of the treatment, (b) the acceptability of receiving CBT from audiologists, and (c) the most effective treatment components. Design This was a service evaluation survey with a cros...

This article reviews the evidence related to the efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for alleviating the distress caused by tinnitus, hyperacusis and misophonia. Where available, the review was focused on meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) using either passive control groups (typically waiting list or education only) or...

The loudness of two-tone complexes (TTCs) with center frequencies (fc) of 40, 63, 80, and 1000 Hz was matched with that of unmodulated tones (UTs). Frequency differences between the TTC components, corresponding to beat frequencies, fb, were 1, 2, 5, and 12 Hz. To compensate for the steep decline in hearing sensitivity below 100 Hz, prior to the lo...

The discrimination of amplitude modulation (AM) from frequency modulation (FM) of a 1000-Hz carrier, with equally detectable AM and FM, is better for a 2-Hz than for a 10-Hz modulation rate. This might reflect greater sensitivity to temporal fine structure for low than for high rates. Alternatively, AM-FM discrimination may depend on comparing fluc...

Objective: It is possible that tinnitus, hearing loss and insomnia are all linked to oxidative stress. If so, there should be a relationship between insomnia and hearing loss among patients with tinnitus. The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between insomnia and hearing thresholds for patients with tinnitus. Design: This was a retro...

Some environmental sounds have strong amplitude fluctuations that may affect their perceived loudness and annoyance. This study assessed the effect of beat rate (fb) and center frequency (fc) on the loudness of low-frequency beating tones. The loudness of two-tone complexes (TTCs) with fc = 40, 63, 80, and 1000 Hz was matched with that of unmodulat...

The ability to discriminate irregular from regular amplitude modulation was compared for young and older adults with audiometric thresholds within the normal range for frequencies from 250 to 8000 Hz, using the “envelope regularity discrimination” (ERD) test. The amount of irregularity was parametrically varied and quantified by an “irregularity in...

Background: Many patients seeking help for tinnitus also suffer from insomnia. Adverse childhood experiences may affect the likelihood of insomnia in later life for such patients. Purpose: To explore whether parental separation and parental mental health during childhood are related to the severity of insomnia among patients with tinnitus and/or...

Musicians are better than non-musicians at discriminating changes in the fundamental frequency (F0) of harmonic complex tones. Such discrimination may be based on place cues derived from low resolved harmonics, envelope cues derived from high harmonics, and temporal fine structure (TFS) cues derived from both low and high harmonics. The present stu...

Speech-in-noise perception is a major problem for users of cochlear implants (CIs), especially with non-stationary background noise. Noise-reduction algorithms have produced benefits but relied on a priori information about the target speaker and/or background noise. A recurrent neural network (RNN) algorithm was developed for enhancing speech in n...

The present paper introduces a deep neural network (DNN) for predicting the instantaneous loudness of a sound from its time waveform. The DNN was trained using the output of a more complex model, called the Cambridge loudness model. While a modern PC can perform a few hundred loudness computations per second using the Cambridge loudness model, it c...

The ability to discriminate irregular from regular amplitude modulation was assessed using the “envelope regularity discrimination” test. The amount of irregularity was parametrically varied and quantified by an “irregularity index.” Normative data were gathered for young subjects with normal audiometric thresholds. Parameters varied were the carri...

Speech-in-noise perception is a major problem for users of cochlear implants (CIs), especially with non-stationary background noise such as competing talkers or traffic. Algorithms that facilitate speech perception by attenuating background noise have produced benefits but relied on a priori information about the target speaker and/or background no...

Objective: To evaluate a system – “the service” – designed to improve mobile telephone communication for people with hearing loss. Design: Each participant registered online and took an online hearing test using their own mobile telephone held in the position of their choice. The test assessed the combined effects of the telephone, the hearing loss...

The effect of temporal repetition rate R on the discrimination and internal representation of stimuli with spectro-temporal ripples was examined. Experiment 1 measured the highest ripple density D at which upward- and downward-gliding ripples could be discriminated. Thresholds varied only slightly for R from 2 to 8 Hz, with a median threshold just...

It is widely believed that the frequency selectivity of the auditory system is largely determined by processes occurring in the cochlea. If so, musical training would not be expected to influence frequency selectivity. Consistent with this, auditory filter shapes for low center frequencies do not differ for musicians and nonmusicians. However, it h...

The effects on speech intelligibility and sound quality of two noise-reduction algorithms were compared: a deep recurrent neural network (RNN) and spectral subtraction (SS). The RNN was trained using sentences spoken by a large number of talkers with a variety of accents, presented in babble. Different talkers were used for testing. Participants wi...

Tinnitus is a hearing disorder characterized by the perception of sound without external acoustic stimuli, which is caused by damage to the auditory system in response to excessive levels of noise, ototoxic agents and aging. Neural plasticity, oxidative/nitrosative stress and apoptosis play important roles in the pathogenesis of tinnitus. The expre...

Within the cochlea, broadband sounds like speech and music are filtered into a series of narrowband signals, each with a relatively slowly varying envelope (ENV) imposed on a rapidly oscillating carrier (the temporal fine structure, TFS). Information about ENV and TFS is conveyed in the timing and short-term rate of action potentials in the auditor...

The relative importance of neural temporal and place coding in auditory perception is still a matter of much debate. The current article is a compilation of viewpoints from leading auditory psychophysicists and physiologists regarding the upper frequency limit for the use of neural phase locking to code temporal fine structure in humans. While phas...

ISO 532-2 is based on the loudness model for stationary sounds described by Moore and Glasberg [JASA (2007)]. This model is similar to that in ANSI S3.4-2007, except that the model in ISO 532-2 incorporates binaural inhibition: a strong input to one ear in a given frequency region reduces the effective level of a weaker input to the other ear in ne...

The perceptual segregation of simultaneous harmonic complex tones depends partly on differences in the fundamental frequency (F0) between those tones. Human listeners have some ability to group together harmonics of a given F0 and segregate them from harmonics of a different F0. This paper reviews studies of the ability to detect changes in F0 of o...

Objective: To assess the relationship between the loudness of tinnitus and insomnia via a mediation analysis. Design: Retrospective cross-sectional. Study Sample: 417 consecutive patients seeking treatment for tinnitus in an Audiology Department in the UK. Results: Mediation analysis showed that the relationship between tinnitus loudness measured u...

The objective was to determine the effects of two frequency-lowering algorithms (frequency transposition, FT, and frequency compression, FC) on audibility, speech identification, and subjective benefit, for people with high-frequency hearing loss and extensive dead regions (DRs) in the cochlea. A single-blind randomized crossover design was used. F...