Results of an auditory training for blind/visually impaired children and teenagers are presented. A measure of the training eectiveness is the dierence between the results of a pre-and post-training verication test. Two age groups of visually handicapped young persons were tested: 712 years old and 1419 years old. It was shown that the training may be beneciary for blind or visually impaired children and teenagers, especially in tasks related to localization of moving sound sources. No dierences in training results were found between age groups. The results of trained groups were compared to those obtained for not trained control groups of young blind individuals.

The paper was inspired by the hitherto published results concerning provision of ecient assistance to visually impaired persons by means of acoustic and vibratory signals. The aim of the auditory training is to shorten the time necessary for execution of auditory information processing, sensibilize blind persons to dierences in sounds and teach them to focus auditory attention on small dierences in parameters of acoustic waves, in order to achieve independent and correct interpretation of environment by hearing and listening. The basic concept of the auditory training addressed to blind or visually impaired children and teenagers is presented in detail. Preliminary verication of the eectiveness of training of young adults without vision impairments has not shown statistically signicant dierences in performance before and after the training. Possible reasons for such an eect are pointed out and solutions are suggested.

Elaboration of a new method of teaching spatial orientation to blind and visually handicapped persons base on urban environment sounds was shown. Task 1 is a questionnaire inquiry on the problems of the blind moving in a big city. In Task 2 a preliminary selection and classication of the acoustic signals and vibrations that can be useful for spatial orientation was made. In Task 3 an analysis of acoustic signals for sound signalisation at pedestrian crossings was made. Some solutions for acoustic signalization were proposed. In Task 4 sounds and vibrations necessary for a library of acoustic events and situations characteristic of a city were recorded. In Task 5 the library was created and arranged to be ready to be used by teachers in the spatial orientation training. The most important outcome of the study was to develop a method of spatial orientation teaching with employment of sounds and verication of the method (Task 6). After verication it is concluded that the method is useful for spatial education of the blind at dierent levels of their education.

The study was undertaken to check the eect of 3D sound recording and reproduction methods on performance in localization of sound source by the visually impaired and normally sighted subjects. The performance was evaluated on the basis of the ability to identify the direction from which the sound comes and the direction of its propagation. The experiment involved a test in which the subjects were exposed to sounds reproduced by two methods of spatial reproduction: binaural (headphones) and Ambisonics (loudspeaker). The binaural recordings were reproduced through two types of headphones, open and closed ones, and the recordings were made with the help of a dummy head. The recordings for loudspeaker reproduction were made with the use of two microphone matrices, Octava and Panasonic. The subjects were adults and children, including blind and VIC. They had otologically normal hearing. The test included realization of three tasks. The rst concerned identication of the direction from which sound has come from an immovable source, a rattle or a drum. In the second and third task, the subjects were asked to indicate the direction of motion of the source of sound (vehicle). For the adults, the method of recording and reproduction of sound had little eect on the test results. For the VIC, a signicant dierence was noted between the results of headphone and loudspeaker exposure, to the advantage of the headphone exposure. The method of binaural recording and sound exposure through headphones seems much more eective for auditory training of VIC.

Performance of blind/visually impaired children and teenagers before and after the auditory training and the music training in some auditory tasks (pitch discrimination, pitch-timbre categorization, pitch memory, lateralization of a stationary sound of a drum, lateralization of one or two moving motor vehicles) is compared. In the auditory training, the subjects were actively involved, i.e. they had to answer questions related to presented sound material. The music training was based on passive listening to sounds presented according to the Tomatis method. The training (auditory or music) effectiveness was measured as a difference between results of a pre-and post-training verification test in which the subjects were asked to perform the auditory tasks mentioned at the beginning. The persons who took part in the study were divided into two age groups: 7-12 year olds and 13-19 year olds. According to the results, the auditory training was beneficial for blind or visually impaired teenagers, especially in respect of lateralization tasks. For small children the auditory training was not as effective as for adolescents. However, it has been shown that the music training was generally beneficial for them, although none of the verification tasks was privileged.