Solving the cocktail party problem for bilateral cochlear implant users

It is well-known that listeners with hearing impairment have trouble solving the cocktail party problem. Bilateral cochlear implant users have shown little or no perceptual abilities in this regard. This is due in large part to poor encoding of interaural time difference cues by these devices. Interaural level difference cues, which are well-encoded by bilateral cochlear implants, are not thought to facilitate benefit beyond improved signal-to-noise ratio benefits from head-shadow. An approach to mitigating this problem will be presented, that magnifies interaural level difference cues in real time to increase the perceptual distance between sound sources that are separated in the horizontal plane. The effects of ILD magnification on source localization and speech intelligibility in cocktail-party settings will be discussed.