People with a hearing loss can experience problems when listening to music. 1 on 6 people in the UK has a hearing loss, with this number increasing as the population ages. Poor hearing makes music harder to appreciate. This can mean picking out lyrics or melody lines is more difficult, and music becomes duller as high frequencies disappear. This reduces the enjoyment of music, and can lead to disengagement from listening and music-making, reducing the health and well-being effects we otherwise get from music and music-making.
Hearing aids often work poorly for music because they’re optimised for speech. As well as improvements to hearing aids, the project will look at other opportunities, such as improving music from consumer devices and from mixing desks at live venues.
The grant of £1.6 million is a collaborative partnership with industrial partners BBC R&D, Google and Logitech and user engagement via Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID). This project leads directly on from the Hearing Aids for Music project, led by Professor Greasley, which was the first large-scale, systematic investigation of how music listening is affected by hearing aid technology, with important consequences for both music listening and performance.
Cadenza will enhance music and musical experiences by running a series of competitions, open to researchers from around the world. Competitors will be given music to enhance, through processing and/or remixing. They will be challenged to improve and personalise the music for listeners with hearing losses.
You can sign up to the project's google group for alerts about - and to help shape - the challenges, which will be starting in 2023.
