Grant Award: $49,815
Principal Investigator: Ewan Macpherson, Ph.D.
Institution: Western University
Project Summary:
This project will investigate the sensitivity to, and preferences for, the acoustic characteristics of performance spaces of musicians who use hearing aids. The persistence of sound echoes in a room, reverberation, is known to be particularly detrimental to speech intelligibility for hard of hearing listeners. However, limited research has been done on such listeners’ sensitivity to reverberation in a musical context or on how to enhance their live music experience in reverberant performance spaces.
We will implement a real-time, loudspeaker-based, variable-reverberation room simulation, and use it to quantify hearing aid users’ preferences and ability to detect changes in reverberation parameters while listening or performing. We expect that, compared to normally hearing listeners, hard of hearing listeners will be less sensitive to changes in reverberation parameters and will prefer less reverberation overall. We expect that in hearing aid listening, enhanced amplification of quiet sounds will increase the perception of reverberation and that activation of directionally sensitive microphones will reduce it. Our findings will inform the development of guidelines for acoustical treatments to optimize performance spaces for hard of hearing musicians and of hearing aid fitting protocols to improve performance experiences for musicians using hearing aids.
The findings of this research matter because mitigating negative impacts of reverberation will help to improve hard of hearing musicians’ ability to participate in professional or recreational music performance opportunities.
The project will therefore contribute to enhanced quality of life by creating more inclusive and accommodating spaces for musicians with hearing difficulties in musical performance settings.