Volume 8 Issue 1 (pdf) - Andrew John Publishing Inc

froM the dustY BooKsheLVes |
The Vanderbilt Hearing-Aid Report:
State of the art research needs,
Edited By Gerald A Studebaker and Fred H. Bess. Monographs
in Contemporary Audiology, 1982.
Reviewed by Marshall Chasin, AuD
This is one of my favourite books on
my bookshelf and indeed was quite
dusty. I looked at it often from afar and
that seemed sufficient to remind me of
what was in there and to remind myself
of some important technologies and
design approaches that permeated the
1980s. Dusting off the front cover, the
first paragraph of the Preface gives the
rationale for the “Vanderbilt Report”:
This monograph reports the proceedings
of “A Working Conference on
Amplification for the Hearing Impaired:
Research Needs” held at the Bill
Wilkerson Hearing and Speech Center
of Vanderbilt University in Nashville,
Tennessee on June 7 through 10, 1981.
The impetus for the meeting was the
belief that progress on how best to design
and apply amplification systems for the
hearing impaired has been impeded by
insufficient communication between
researchers working on matters related
to different aspects of the problem….”
Actually, what was not said was even
more important… There was a belief that
progress… has been impeded by
insufficient communication between
manufacturers, researchers, and front line
clinicians. And I must say that this is
indeed the case today. In the 1970s and
1980s manufacturers were scrambling to
glean information on how to build a
better hearing aid and the front-line
clinician was the rock star of the era. If a
clinical or research audiologist showed
up at a hearing aid manufacturer’s facility,
everything stopped and the audiologist
was bombarded with questions and
perspectives on how best to help the hard
of hearing clients. In contrast, today it’s
the other way around. Many manufacturers
have well-funded facilities and
employ world class researchers that
provide in-house solutions to hearing aid
design problems. I can see strengths to
both approaches, but for obvious reasons
I recall a fondness for the early 1980s!
The “Vanderbilt Report” as it colloquially
became known, brought together those
researchers at the time who were at the
top of their game. All aspects of the
design and the fitting of hearing aids were
addressed including new and updated
models of normal and pathological
auditory systems.
Section I is entitled “Basic Research –
Sound Perception by the Hearing
Impaired”. There are articles on the
psychoacoustics of elementary sound,
spectral and temporal resolution by the
hearing impaired, Spectral considerations
in the speech discrimination ability of the
hearing impaired, and temporal
distortions in noise. The authors involved
B. Scharf, M. Florentine, L. Humes, H.
Levitt, and A. Nabelek. D. Dirks and S.
Gelfand also contributed with well
thought out comments on some of these
topics.
The next section was a product of its
time and technology. Section II is
entitled “Basic Research-Electroacoustic
Considerations for Hearing Aid
Performance.” The articles were about
research problems in coupler and in situ
measurements, and functional gain
correlates of electroacoustic performance
data. The author list included E. Burnett,
D. Preves, R. Cox. Reading this section
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