A special concert for people who have difficulty hearing music
How a McMaster research team is making music compatible with hearing aids
AHEARING AID that makes speech audible for the hearing impaired can also make music practically unlistenable. Turning up the volume on conversation, it seems, is one thing. But music, with its greater range of pitch, is another.
A hearing aid can distort highs and lows, turning a once pleasurable experience into something irritating and stressful. It can turn people off music all together, isolate them, leave them sitting at home while others go out and enjoy their favourite artists in concert.
A team of researchers is making use of McMaster University’s high-tech LIVELab theatre, hoping to find a way to improve hearing aid technology and concert venue acoustics to make music more enjoyable for people with hearing loss.
They are launching their project next week with two special concert/lectures, Nov. 17 and 18, at the 100-seat theatre. Helping them out will be the Toronto-based Madawaska String Quartet and a sophisticated $200,000 dummy called KEMAR (an acronym for “Knowles Electronics Mannequin for Acoustic Research”).
“When you have hearing loss, soft sounds disappear but loud sounds stay just as loud as ever,” Dan Bosnyak, a PhD in neuroscience, explains. “So you can’t just add a bunch of volume to things and expect that to work, because sounds that are moderately loud in the environment become uncomfortably loud in the hearing aid.”
Bosnyak is the technical director of the $8 million LIVELab (an acronym for Large Interactive Virtual Environment Laboratory). His specialty is mapping how our brains respond to auditory stimulation, especially in people with peripheral hearing loss.
That’s not an easy thing, explains his colleague Calvin Staples, a practicing audiologist now studying for his PhD. After years of outfitting people with hearing aids, Staples has learned that his clients often find it difficult to explain how their ears react to sound. One thing most agree on, however, is that they miss listening to music.
“Music is a real big part of most people’s lives, whether it is playing it or just enjoying it,” says Staples. “It’s a growing request from our patients — ‘How can I enjoy music?’”
With the help of KEMAR, The LIVELab can be a unique tool to help them. The room itself is a big part of it. A complex system of 72 speakers and 20 hanging microphones give technicians the splitsecond ability to change the room’s reverb to reproduce the sound ambience of a cathedral, concert hall, classroom, restaurant or jazz club.
The plan at the two upcoming concerts is to place KEMAR, wearing a hearing aid, in a seat in the audience. Sound engineers will be able to read how his electronic brain reacts to the music. They’ll be able to adjust both the hearing aid and the tone of the room to make the sound more palatable.
The researchers, including engineering graduate student Larissa
Taylor, will also be able to hook up the hearing aids of concert attendees, tuning them to a hearing assisted stream to correspond with KEMAR’s and, hopefully, giving them a more enjoyable musical experience.
“Inside of his head there’s some really fancy microphones and an ear canal simulator,” Bosnyak says, opening KEMAR’s head to reveal an intricate network of gadgetry. “The sound engineer will be listening to what KEMAR’s hearing and he’ll be able to adjust the program that we send out to the hearing assisted stream in real time with the quartet playing, helping the people with hearing aids to hear the sound in the best possible way.”
All the researchers need now is for people with hearing loss to attend the concerts, which will also feature a lecture by Larry Roberts, professor emeritus, McMaster department of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour. The team has been postering local audiology clinics to get the word out.
“We absolutely need people either with hearing aids or people with some moderate hearing loss who don’t have hearing aids,” says Bosnyak.
“We want them to come with their equipment and a pair of headphones if they have them.
“Hopefully this concert will kick off a period of research where some of those people with hearing loss will come back and let us experiment on them.”