Hormones affect hearing in varying ways over the course of a person’s life.
PHILADELPHIA, May 13, 2026 — Throughout medical history, men have generally been the target of studies, with results generalized to women. However, there are differences between the sexes in many aspects of human perception. Hormones influence the behavior of cells in the brain, including areas of the brain that process hearing.
Within the past decade, scientists have begun recognizing these differences and their effects on health outcomes. In line with this change, Anhelina Bilokon from the University of Maryland will present her work related to sex-dependent auditory variability Wednesday, May 13, at 9:25 a.m. ET as part of the 190th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, running May 11-15.
A participant listens to a hearing test as a part of a larger experiment to determine how sex differences and hormones affect hearing. Credit: Anhelina Bilokon
“Hearing is quite precise and sensitive, and because of that, even small hormonal changes in the areas that regulate and process sound can have an effect,” Bilokon said. “When hormone levels change or fluctuate, the structures and processes that support hearing can change and fluctuate as well.”
In simple hearing tests, men show an earlier, more gradual decline, while women experience regular fluctuations each month during menstruation and sharp changes at menopause. By reanalyzing existing auditory data, Bilokon’s work focuses not just on how well people hear, but also on how these processes change and interact with other biologically significant events over time. “Hearing is not free from the influence of other biological aspects of human health,” she said.
Because these variations are critical for understanding markers of auditory decline, Bilokon encourages her fellow scientists to consider sex differences and hormone effects more holistically in their studies. In addition to presenting evidence for sex-dependent auditory variability, Bilokon’s work outlines how additional studies can better understand these differences, which extend beyond simple sound detection.
“There are well-established guidelines for studying sex differences that have come from adjacent fields, and I hope our efforts over time will provide hearing-behavior approaches that can be easily adapted across labs,” Bilokon said.
Ultimately, learning about auditory differences between the sexes will provide insights into treating and managing hearing loss in a more personalized way — not only for women.
“This work is about improving how we understand hearing for everyone,” Bilokon said. “By simply recognizing real biological differences, we can shift our scientific approach toward more accurate diagnoses and better care.”
###
For more information: AIP Media 1 301.209.3090 media@aip.org
ASA PRESS ROOM In the coming weeks, ASA’s Press Room will be updated with newsworthy stories and the press conference schedule at https://acoustics.org/asa-press-room/.
LAY LANGUAGE PAPERS ASA will also share dozens of lay language papers about topics covered at the conference. Lay language papers are summaries (300-500 words) of presentations written by scientists for a general audience. They will be accompanied by photos, audio, and video. Learn more at https://acoustics.org/lay-language-papers/.
PRESS REGISTRATION ASA will grant free registration to the in-person conference at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown for credentialed and professional freelance journalists. If you are a reporter and would like to attend the meeting and/or press conferences, contact AIP Media Services at media@aip.org. For urgent requests, AIP staff can also help with setting up interviews and obtaining images, sound clips, or background information.
ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA The Acoustical Society of America is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world’s leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
A new standard for assessing pickleball noise has been developed to better reflect how people actually experience the sound, especially in neighborhoods near courts. The growing popularity of pickleball—and the rapid expansion of new courts—is creating a clear need for improved and simplified acoustical standards to avoid excessive noise in nearby residential areas. This proposed noise standard has already been successfully applied on multiple projects, including the evaluation of new courts planned near homes and the development of sound reduction solutions for existing courts.
Pickleball has a distinct “pop” when the paddle hits the ball, and that sharp, repetitive sound can be more noticeable and irritating than steady background noise.
Current standards based on average sound levels with a slow meter response tend to smooth out these sharp peaks and will understate the annoyance from pickleball. This new approach improves on those methods by focusing on the loudest, most noticeable moments of play.
It uses a sound level meter set to a fast response and maximum (peak) measurement, allowing it to capture the highest sound levels rather than averaging everything together. It also uses A-weighting (dBA) so that measurements reflect how the human ear perceives sound.
A key feature of the standard is how it accounts for existing background noise. First, the ambient sound level is measured using a slow, averaging setting. If that background sound is 47 dBA or lower, the limit for pickleball noise is set at 50 dBA (fast maximum). If the background sound is higher than 47 dBA, the allowable pickleball noise level increases to 3 dBA above the measured background level. This signal-to-noise approach ensures that pickleball sound does not stand out excessively compared to its surroundings as shown in the figure below.
Importantly, the standard does not prescribe specific noise control methods. Instead, it establishes a clear threshold above which sound is likely to become objectionable. This makes it a practical tool for both planning and enforcement. It can be used before construction to evaluate whether new courts will meet acceptable noise levels with or without mitigation measures, and it can also be applied to existing courts to assess and guide sound reduction efforts.
Another advantage is its simplicity and practicality. Unlike environmental standards that require 24-hour monitoring and complex averaging with adjustments, this method can be used quickly in the field by acoustical consultants, police officers, zoning officials, or community inspectors using standard sound level meters. By focusing on the most noticeable characteristics of pickleball noise, it provides a more accurate, realistic, and enforceable approach than current standards commonly used in community noise ordinances. This standard could be an addendum to an existing community noise ordinance to address pickleball noise.
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
If you listen to two different sounds that are similar in pitch across the ears, something strange happens. The two sounds blend perceptually to create an illusion of a new sound, similar to what happens with different colors across the eyes.
For example, if you listen here with stereo headphones to the vowels “ah” as in hot and “ee” as in heed, spoken by two different talkers with different voice pitch – a male talker and a female talker – you will hear two vowels.
Figure 1. Perception when two different vowels are played to the two ears at different pitch. Play different pitch example.Note: Stereo headphones are necessary to experience the illusion
But if these same vowels are spoken by the same talker, you will experience something called binaural fusion (Reiss and Molis, 2021). Instead of hearing two different vowels, you will hear a single new vowel. This new vowel will be a blend of the two original vowels, something in between like “eh” as in head.
Figure 2. Perception when two different vowels are played to the two ears at the same pitch. Play same pitch example. Note: Stereo headphones are necessary to experience the illusion
This illusion is not confined to steady sounds, but also happens for sounds that are fluctuating, such as a tone that is fluctuating in one ear and steady in the other ear. This makes localization of the fluctuating tone difficult.
While we know that people experience binaural fusion, we don’t know what happens in the brain so that some sounds fuse while others are heard as distinct. It’s hard to measure detailed brain activity in humans, so we are now studying what happens in the brain of animals, in this case ferrets, when they experience the same illusion. The first thing we had to do was demonstrate that ferrets perceive these illusions the same way as humans. For vowels, ferrets were first trained to indicate when they heard the vowel “eh”, and to ignore the vowels “ah” and “ee”. When “ah” and “ee” were played to the two ears at the same pitch, the ferrets responded that they heard “eh”. Similarly, for fluctuating tones, ferrets were trained to indicate the side where they heard the fluctuating tone, and they experienced the same difficulties as human listeners.
As a next step, recordings from cells in the brain will reveal how brain activity leads to these illusory phenomena. Binaural fusion and the converse, binaural fission, are important to understand because together they underlie how the brain groups components of sound that belong to one source, such as a single talker, and separates those that belong to different sources, such as other talkers (Bregman, 1990; Bronkhorst, 2000).
It is shown that people with hearing loss, including those with cochlear implants, often experience excessive binaural fusion, and fuse voices of different pitch together (Reiss et al., 2014; 2017; 2018). Excessive binaural fusion explains a large portion of difficulties with understanding speech in noisy environments (Oh et al., 2022; 2023). Understanding how brain circuits encode binaural fusion and fission will show us how to train or rewire the brain to help people with hearing loss and other auditory processing disorders.
In the meantime, think about how you can come up with other new illusory sounds by combining two different sounds of the same pitch!
Works cited
Bregman, A. S. (1990). Auditory Scene Analysis (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA).
Bronkhorst, A. W. (2000). The cocktail party phenomenon: A review of research on speech intelligibility in multiple-talker conditions. Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 86(1), 117-128.
Oh, Y., Hartling, C. L., Srinivasan, N. K., Diedesch, A. C., Gallun, F. J., & Reiss, L. A. J. (2022). Factors underlying masking release by voice-gender differences and spatial separation cues in multi-talker listening environments in listeners with and without hearing loss. Frontiers in neuroscience, 16, 1059639.
Oh, Y., Srinivasan, N.K., Hartling, C.L., Gallun, F.J., and Reiss, L.A.J. (2023). Differential effects of binaural pitch fusion range on the benefits of voice gender differences in a ‘cocktail party’ environment for bimodal and bilateral cochlear implant users. Ear Hear. 44(2), 318–329.
Reiss, L. A., Fowler, J. R., Hartling, C. L., and Oh, Y. (2018) Binaural pitch fusion in bilateral cochlear implant users. Ear Hear. 39(2), 390-397.
Reiss, L.A., Ito, R.A., Eggleston, J.L., and Wozny, D.R. (2014). Abnormal binaural spectral integration in cochlear implant users. J. Assoc. Res. Otolaryngol., 15(2), 235–248.
Reiss, L.A.J., and Molis, M.R.. (2021) An Alternative Explanation for Difficulties with Speech in Background Talkers: Abnormal Fusion of Vowels across Fundamental Frequency and Ears. J. Assoc. Res. Otolaryngol., 22(4): 443-461.
Reiss, L.A., Shayman, C.S., Walker, E.P., Bennett, K.O., Fowler, J.R., Hartling, C.L., Glickman, B., Lasarev, M.R., and Oh, Y. (2017). Binaural pitch fusion: Comparison of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. J.Acoust. Soc. Am., 141(3), 1909–1920.
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
Hearing aids help millions of people hear speech more clearly. But they may quietly reshape something else: your sense of where sounds are coming from. A new wave of affordable, over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids is now available and they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and styles. Our study aims to understand what characteristics of hearing aids support (or disrupt) sound localization.
The ability to localize sound (knowing whether a car is approaching from the left or right, whether a voice is coming from in front of you or behind) is something most people take for granted. This spatial awareness relies on subtle acoustic cues available at the two ears. These cues can easily be disrupted by devices placed in or around the ear. Listeners with mild hearing loss, the very group that OTC devices are designed for, may be particularly vulnerable to these distortions, since they have relatively good sensitivity to sounds and their detailed characteristics.
To investigate, 14 adults with normal hearing were fitted with four different OTC devices representing a range of styles currently on the market: Lexie B2 Plus (a traditional behind-the-ear style), Eargo (an invisible in-the-canal style) and Apple Air pods Pro 2 (representing the growing category of consumer earbuds that can function as hearing aids).
Each participant completed a set of spatial listening tasks while wearing each device, and also without any device as a baseline. The tasks were designed to probe three distinct aspects of spatial perception: (1) Azimuth identification tests whether a listener can accurately judge the horizontal direction of a sound source; (2) Front-back discrimination asks whether listeners can tell whether a sound is coming from in front of them or behind; (3) Sound externalization refers to whether sounds are perceived as coming from the outside world, or from inside the head like when listening over headphones.
The results were clear: every OTC device tested disrupted spatial perception (Figure 1). However, the specific aspects of spatial perception that were affected, and the extent of the disruption, depended on the device and on the individual. By examining these patterns, we are able to make inferences about which features of OTC hearing aids support spatial perception and which features have a disrupting effect.
Figure 1. Mean absolute externalization ratings across hearing aid conditions, with individual participant data overlaid.
As the market for consumer hearing devices continues to grow, it is important to understand how they affect all aspects of hearing, not just speech clarity. This will be essential for helping people make informed choices about hearing aids and for designing more natural-sounding hearing aids in the future.
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
“Noise must one day be fought as bitterly as cholera and the plague,” Robert Koch the German bacteriologist famously said at the turn of the 20th century. He was right—today we know that too much noise can harm our well-being and lead to real health problems.
Traditionally, we’ve tried to “combat” noise with after-the-fact abatement measures. But wouldn’t it make more sense to prevent noise before it ever starts? That’s why, decades ago, ISO standards laid out rules for low-noise design across the entire sound-generation chain—from the source, through all the transmission paths, to the listener. Yet in our modern, highly technical, urban world, these low-noise principles alone aren’t enough: noise challenges are still growing.
Take traffic, for example. In cities around the world, countless people are constantly disturbed by the noise of cars, trains and aircraft. We need to step up our efforts with a full paradigm shift toward acoustics-oriented design—a strategy that defines desired sound characteristics right at the start of product development and then uses methods and tools to predict, create, implement, and assess those acoustic properties throughout the entire process.
Figure 1: From noise abatement to acoustics-oriented design in all phases of product development (Image adapted from Rothe[1]) and Langer [2])
That sounds great in theory—but how do you predict what a complex system like an aircraft will sound like before you even build a prototype? The answer is advanced computer modelling, efficient simulation and perceptual-driven assessment. These tools let us forecast how a future aircraft will sound like and let us even listen to it.
Figure 2: Enabler for acoustics-oriented design: Modeling, Simulation, Assessment (Image adapted from Langer [3] )
Implementing acoustics-oriented design, we make sure that tomorrow’s aircraft not only burn less fuel and emit fewer pollutants but also sound pleasant—both inside the cabin and out on the ground.
[1] Rothe, S.: Design and placement of passive acoustic measures in early design phases. Schriften des Instituts für Akustik. 2022
[2] Langer, S.: Paving the path for acoustics-oriented design. ISCV31, 2025
[3] Thoma, J.; Delfs, J.: Proskurov, S.; Langer, S. C.: Cabin acoustics in preliminary aircraft design with propulsion pressure field excitation. DAS-DAGA2025/629, 2025.
–The research described in this Acoustics Lay Language Paper may not have yet been peer reviewed–
Imagine you’re eating with your friend, when you both suddenly get distracted by someone angrily arguing with their date. The conversation captured your attention due to its emotional content. This attention-grabbing experience of an angry conversation may intensify for those with anxiety disorders.
In hearing, auditory selective attention refers to the process of focusing on one sound while suppressing attention to other sounds. This is important for hearing speech in noise and focusing on conversations in social settings. Exploring how anxiety may affect auditory attention is critical to understanding how anxiety disorder symptoms affect everyday social situations.
Generalized anxiety disorders are characterized by excessive, clinically significant worry, whereas social anxiety disorders are marked by persistent fear or anxiety about social situations (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). People with anxiety disorders tend to have attention biases, especially in response to threat.
Figure 1. Visualization of Auditory Emotional Attention Process.
For example, research with visual stimuli, such as written words, demonstrates that individuals with anxiety exhibit an attention bias toward negative stimuli over neutral or positive stimuli (Fox, 1993; Yiend & Mathews, 2001). However, much less is known about a potential bias to sound in anxiety disorders. Negative emotion in speech can be conveyed through rhythm, stress, and intonation, otherwise known as prosody (Ladd, 2008). So, if individuals with anxiety disorders are biased toward negative sounds, like angry voices, that could interfere with auditory selective attention, making it difficult for them to follow conversations when others speak around them.
In this study, young adults listened to a target sentence while ignoring a second sentence played simultaneously. In the “Emotional Target” condition, the target sentence was spoken with emotional prosody (happy, sad, or angry-sounding), with a neutral (no prosody) distractor sentence. In the “Emotional Distractor” condition, the target was neutral, whereas the distractor was emotional. Additionally, participants completed the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7) (Spitzer et al., 2006) and the Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS) (Heimberg et al., 1992). We expected that individuals with greater symptom severity for generalized and social anxiety would have more difficulty attending to neutral speech while ignoring emotional speech.
Instead, our findings demonstrated that people with greater generalized anxiety disorder symptoms performed significantly better on both conditions of the task. Individuals with higher levels of social anxiety symptoms also demonstrated significantly better performance on the Emotional Target condition. While these results don’t align with our hypothesis, they are consistent with increased vigilance in anxiety disorders (Bögels & Mansell, 2004; Vassilopoulos, 2005).
Our study findings suggest that individuals with generalized anxiety and social anxiety disorders experience greater auditory salience to emotionally prosodic stimuli. This means they’re better able to both attend to and ignore emotional stimuli than are individuals without these disorders. Thus, further research on auditory emotional attention will help understand attentional bias and provide insight into the treatment of anxiety disorders.
But until then, the next time you’re in a noisy room, consider which sounds capture your attention!
Works Cited
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425787
Bögels, S. M., & Mansell, W. (2004). Attention processes in the maintenance and treatment of social phobia: Hypervigilance, avoidance and self-focused attention. Clinical Psychology Review, 24(7), 827–856. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2004.06.005
Fox, E. (1993). Allocation of visual attention and anxiety. Cognition and Emotion, 7(2), 207–215.
Heimberg, R. G., Mueller, G. P., Holt, C. S., Hope, D. A., & Liebowitz, M. R. (1992). Assessment of anxiety in social interaction and being observed by others: The Social Interaction Anxiety Scale and the Social Phobia Scale. Behavior Therapy, 23(1), 53–73.
Ladd, D. R. (2008). Intonational phonology (2nd ed). Cambridge university press.
Spitzer, R. L., Kroenke, K., Williams, J. B., & Löwe, B. (2006). A brief measure for assessing generalized anxiety disorder: The GAD-7. Archives of Internal Medicine, 166(10), 1092–1097.
Vassilopoulos, S. P. (2005). Social anxiety and the vigilance-avoidance pattern of attentional processing. Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy, 33(1), 13–24.
Yiend, J., & Mathews, A. (2001). Anxiety and attention to threatening pictures. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 54(3), 665–681.
Figure 1. Perception when two different vowels are played to the two ears at different pitch. 
Figure 2. Perception when two different vowels are played to the two ears at the same pitch. 
Figure 1. Mean absolute externalization ratings across hearing aid conditions, with individual participant data overlaid.
Figure 1: From noise abatement to acoustics-oriented design in all phases of product development (Image adapted from Rothe[1]) and Langer [2])
Figure 2: Enabler for acoustics-oriented design: Modeling, Simulation, Assessment (Image adapted from Langer [3] )
Figure 1. Visualization of Auditory Emotional Attention Process.
Figure 2. Auditory Emotional Attention Task Instructions.