# The Effects of Musical Experience and Hearing Loss on Solving an Audio-Based Gaming Task
## 3 Materials and Methods  
An experiment was designed to collect gaming data and user evaluations. The experiment was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and with ethical approval from the involved universities. All included data are anonymous. Each participant was carefully briefed about the experiment and signed a consent form to participate. In the study, we only look at various time measurements, frequencies of interactions, and preference of sound material. In addition, participants were informed about hearing acuity and music listening experiences. We conducted three sets of gaming sessions with a total of 36 participants (14 female). They were university students of ages from 18 to 23, and were recruited into equally-sized groups as follows:  
\begin{tabular}{l l l l}
**Group** & **Hearing** & **Language** & **Musical experience** \\ _HI_ & Impairment & Japanese & - \\ _NEX_ & Normal & Japanese & Low \\ _EXP_ & Normal & Japanese & High \\ \end{tabular}  
The Japanese hearing-impaired participants (_HI_) group was recruited from a university for hearing-impaired technology students. Eleven participants had profound degrees of hearing loss, while one participant had severe hearing loss [62]. Profound loss is considered to be above 90 dB, and severe in the range 70-90 dB. Hearing loss and acuity are measured with audiometers and expressed in decibels hearing level (dB\({}_{HL}\)). Because of the human ears' characteristic of perceiving sounds differently depending on frequencies, decibels sound pressure level (dB\({}_{SPL}\)) cannot show hearing acuity by frequency [63]. Eleven of the participants used hearing aids in the experiment and one was a cochlear implantee. They could use their hearing aids according to their own preferences with two intended benefits: for their comfort, and because this would approximate their typical listening situation. Though the research with hearing-impaired persons tends to focus on either cochlear implanters or users of hearing aids, we do not divide them according to their hearing devices because our research interest is to provide them the opportunities to listen to sounds with joy.  
The recruitment of Japanese hearing participants with low musical experience (_NEX_) and Japanese hearing participants with high musical experience (_EXP_) was based on their self-assessment of engagement in musical activities; _NEX_ were recruited among students without ongoing music activities, while _EXP_ had formal activities. As a simplified measure of music activity, we asked them to rate their musical experience in terms of listening to music in everyday life with respect to five levels ranging from very rare to very often; the question included examples of listening situations. Figure 2 shows the ratio of their music-listening experiences. For _HI_, musical experience was registered, but not used as a qualifier for inclusion in the experiment. There was one hearing-impaired participant who did not listen to music, but otherwise the musical experience of _HI_ and _NEX_ matched very well (the summed ratios of'very often' and 'often', and of 'rarely' and'very rarely' were the same between the two groups). One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) shows there are significant differences in music-listening experiences (\(p=0.02\)), and from multiple comparisons differences are seen between _HI_/_EXP_ and _NEX_/_EXP_.