A Simultaneous Measurement of (E)ASSR and Pitch Discrimination Ability

Background: Auditory steady state response (ASSR) recording has the advantage that the estimation of hearing parameters (e. g. audiogram) requires no active participation of the subject. A previous study presented a setup that combines ASSR recording and a simultaneous two alternative unforced choice (AuC) pitch discrimination task (Bahmer and Baumann 2015).

Methods: The previous setup was expanded to a three alternative unforced choice test for pitch discrimination to decrease the chance level and consists of a standard PC, RME Fireface UC sound card and Sennheiser HDA 280 headphones. The software is written in MatLab. To evaluate the setup the stimuli (SAM) were looped back and analyzed.

Results: The test signal was simultaneously recorded with responses of the AuC test. The subsequent analysis of the test signal showed that the algorithm can reliably detect corresponding ASSR test signals.

Conclusion: Due to the successful evaluation, the next step is an evaluation with normal hearing subjects and transfer the setup to measure with cochlea implant subjects (EASSR).