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Dear Sathish and all, I agree with Lorenzo. Their 3D tone-in toolkit is probably the best off-the-shelf solution for your purpose. I have been working toward updating the Dietz et al. (2011) / Kayser et al. (2015) model – it’s been a while. My long-term goal is predicting individual sound localization performance, including hearing aid users. However,
there is a long list of open questions: We cannot even properly model some aspects of sound localization in normal hearing. Next there is only a partial theory on the (average) influences of various types and degrees of hearing impairment on sound localization,
let alone detailed models. As soon as asymmetric hearing loss or neurologic disorders are involved, we are still pretty much at square one. With respect to hearing aids, it is never quite certain if your simulator missed out an important proprietary feature,
especially in case of high-end binaural hearing aids. And if and how your patient has adapted to the hearing aid amplification. In asymmetric hearing loss this can be large and individual differences as we measured recently (Zimmer et al. 2024;
https://dx.doi.org/10.3205/zaud000045). In summary, don’t wait for my update, it will take some more years. Connecting a state-of-the-art front-end, as Dick suggested, is certainly going to help but also not a straightforward task (see, e.g. Klug et al. 2020
https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0001602, which does not even have a localization back-end). And my guess is that any model or model combination is going to let a lot of aspects unexplained (if you have a large and
informative test battery as well as a diverse patient pool). These unexplained aspects will be very important to the field because there is not even a dedicated list or comprehensive review of the things we cannot model. However, I don’t know if that is within
your scope. There is hope that DNNs are going to accelerate and/or strengthen this difficult endeavor (e.g., a combination of Saddler and McDermott 2024
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54700-5 with Saddler et al. 2024
https://computationalaudiology.com/modeling-normal-and-impaired-hearing-with-artificial-neural-networks-optimized-for-ecological-tasks-2/). If you or anyone wants to dig deeper into this, or if you have a specific question on how to modify or interface with my 2011 model, don’t hesitate to contact me. Best, Mathias |