This paper is concerned with the determination of the auditory filter shape using the notched noise method with noise bands symmetrically located above and below a probe frequency of 10 kHz. Unlike in the classical experiments conducted with the use of Patterson method the levels as well as power spectrum densities of the lower and upper component bands of the notched noise masker were not the same and were set such as to produce the same amount of masking at the 10-kHz frequency. The experiment consisted of three conditions in which the following values were determined: (I) the detection threshold for a 10-kHz probe tone in the presence of a noise masker presented below the tone’s frequency; (II) the level of a noise masker presented above the 10-kHz probe tone frequency, at which the masker just masked the probe tone, (III) the detection threshold for a probe tone in the presence of a notched-noise masker. The data show a considerable amount of variability across the subjects, however, the resulting frequency characteristics of the auditory filters are consistent with those presented in the literature so that the Equivalent Rectangular Bandwidth is less than 11% of their centre frequency.

The objective of the study is to assess the hearing performance of cochlear implant users in three device microphone configurations: omni-directional, directional, and beamformer (BEAMformer two-adaptive noise reduction system), in localization and speech perception tasks in dynamically changing listening environments. Seven cochlear implant users aided with Cochlear CM-24 devices with Freedom speech processor participated in the study. For the localization test in quiet and in background noise, subjects demonstrated significant differences between different microphone settings. Confusion matrices showed that in about 70% cases cochlear implant subjects correctly localized sounds within a horizontal angle of 30-40◦ (±1◦ loudspeaker apart from signal source). However localization in noise was less accurate as shown by a large number of considerable errors in localization in the confusion matrices. Average results indicated no significant difference between three microphone configurations. For speech presented from the front 3 dB SNR improvements in speech intelligibility in three subjects can be observed for beamforming system compared to directional and omni-directional microphone settings. The benefits of using different microphone settings in cochlear implant devices in dynamically changing listening conditions depend on the particular sound environment