Advantages of Binaural Hearing

The human auditory system possesses an amazing ability to hear sounds with two ears and to combine the two signals into one to be processed by the brain. This is called binaural processing. This chapter discusses the cues that our auditory system uses to recognize sounds and to separate them into different sound sources, and how listeners with hearing aids and cochlear implants use these cues to enable binaural hearing. It should be noted that most of this discussion on how the auditory system processes sounds is based on findings generally tested in a controlled laboratory environment. Therefore, we try to generalize our discussion to how the auditory system may work in a noncontrolled environment (i.e., a local restaurant).