# The Effects of Musical Experience and Hearing Loss on Solving an Audio-Based Gaming Task
## 5 Discussion
### The Effect of Hearing Acuity  
Since hearing loss affects the proficiency of playing Music Puzzle, it follows that the experiment would reveal differences between the _HI_ participant group and the others (_NEX_ and _EXP_): these are summarized in the first row of Table 4, and more details can be found in Table 3. The following results from multiple comparisons show differences due to hearing loss:  
* Lower ratio of the performed Mixed mode (Table 2(b)).
* Lower ratio of achieved sessions for the Speech mode (Table 3(b)).
* Higher ratio of clicks on \"Pitch cheat\" for Speech and Mixed modes (Figure 4a).
* Higher ratio of clicks on \"EQ cheat\" for Speech and Mixed modes (Figure 4b).
* Fewer attempts at \"change pitch\" in all modes (Figure 4c).
* Fewer attempts at \"change EQ\" in all modes (Figure 4d).
* Higher number of clicks on \"How did I do?\" for Music and Mixed modes (Table 3(g)).
* Longer inter-onset interval (IOI) of clicks for all modes (Table 3(i)).  
These findings lead to considering the following possible interpretations:  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c} \hline \hline
**Effects** & **HI– NEX** & **HI– EXP** & **NEX– EXP** \\ \hline Hearing loss & ✓ & ✓ & \\ Music experiences & ✓ & & ✓ \\ Speech and language & ✓ & ✓ & \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 4: Summary of significant differences between participant groups. The differences between participant groups concerning the effects of hearing loss, music experiences, and language proficiency.  
Figure 6: Duration and inter-onset intervals (IOI) in seconds. Durations for (**a**) game sessions; and for (**b**) IOI of clicks (one click to the next).  
_Hearing-impairment introduces difficulties in extracting useful cues from both music and speech played simultaneously, and from \"listening to\" speech._ Differences between people with and without hearing loss were found for the Mixed condition in the ratio of achieved sessions. This implies that the overlapping of sounds in speech and music makes the game harder to solve for people with hearing loss, or that those with normal hearing can better utilize the additional cues. In the ratio of the performed modes, differences between people with and without hearing loss were found in Speech. In other words, speech, more than music, is difficult for _HI._ Language proficiency will thus be helpful, but the game's puzzles are still not easily solved by constructing lexical meaning from the fragments; these fragments are short, and the poems relatively intricate.  
_Hearing-impairment introduces difficulties in distinguishing pitch alterations and filtering._ Cheat buttons were used more often by people with hearing loss, and they experienced a greater challenge in correcting pitch and EQ. Cheat buttons were also used by hearing participants when they played with Music material. This implies that remembering nuances of pitch and EQ adjustments in music was also difficult for people without hearing loss.  
_Persons with hearing-impairment take longer to process a heard sound._ The study showed that people with hearing loss wait longer after clicking the sound object button or other buttons before clicking a new one. We know that hearing acuity does not correspond with problems of interacting with computers [64], thus the reasons for timing differences could be: (1) they listen to the whole sound from a sounding object or the effect of other buttons, while people without hearing loss only listen to the start, or listen only a certain extent; (2) they listen to sound then think for a while; or (3) the time to start processing sound could be later for _HI._ Considering that the lengths of the fragments correspond to the intervals recorded by _NEX_ and _EXP_ (which means these groups would click the next sound object without hesitation), (1) is a less plausible explanation. We conclude that _HI_ adopt a focused listening strategy which involves longer time for processing the played sounds.