July 7, 2024 • 33 mins
Welcome back to the 'Sounding It Out' podcast, brought to you by Signia UK & Ireland! In this episode, your host Julia Van Huyssteen is joined by Professor Andrew Hugill, Deputy Director at the Institute of Digital Culture at the University of Leicester. Together, they delve into the concept of aural diversity, which acknowledges that everyone hears differently. Professor Hugel shares insights from his vast experience in music, research, and personal journey with hearing issues like autism, severe hearing loss, and Meniere's disease. They discuss the origins of the Aural Diversity Network, the limitations of the traditional audiogram, and how technology can help.
Check out the Aural Diversity webpage for more information: https://auraldiversity.org/
EPISODE SUMMARY
In this episode of 'Sounding It Out,' hosted by Julia Van Huyssteen, the podcast focuses on aural diversity and hearing health, featuring guest Professor Andrew Hugill from the University of Leicester. Julia and Professor Hugel, who is also an autistic individual with severe hearing loss, tinnitus, and Meniere's disease, delve into how unique each person's hearing is and how traditional audiology norms based on a limited sample from the 1950s-60s fall short in addressing this diversity.
They discuss the concept of aural diversity, the importance of recognizing various hearing experiences, and the founding of the Aural Diversity Network in 2018. Professor Hugel shares his personal journey of dealing with hearing differences and how it led him to create music suitable for people with aural divergences. They touch upon how socio-economic, geographical, and ethnic differences impact hearing and the critical differences in hearing at various life stages, from fetal development to old age.
Additionally, the conversation highlights various hearing conditions like sensory-neural and conductive hearing loss, as well as auditory processing disorders and conditions like hyperacusis and tinnitus, emphasizing how these affect people beyond what is measurable by traditional audiological methods.
Towards the end, they discuss the role of technology, from hearing aids to cochlear implants, in re-engineering the soundscape for individuals rather than merely correcting hearing loss. The episode concludes by encouraging listeners to broaden their understanding of hearing differences and inviting them to stay tuned for further episodes that will explore specific causes of hearing variations.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Julia van Huyssteen (00:09):
Hello and welcome back to Sounding It Out, a podcast
dedicated to audiology and hearing health, brought to you by
Signia UK and Ireland. I'm Julia van Huyssteen your host,
and I'm delighted to be back with two new episodes.
And believe me, it was worth the wait. I am
the Head of Audiology at Signia UK and Ireland, and
hearing health is a super passion of mine. If you
(00:32):
know me, you'll definitely know these podcasts are Signia (inaudible)
so that everybody with an interest in hearing health or
audiology can benefit and enjoy them. So please do. For
this next series, we are going through some thought- provoking
explorations around individual experiences of hearing. My guest speaker for
this series is Professor Andrew Hugill, who is the Deputy
(00:54):
Director at the Institute for Digital Culture at the University
of Leicester, where he has also founded the Creative Computing
Program. His background is in music in which he's a
professor and he's an active composer and musicologist. Throughout his
career, he has worked across artistic and scientific disciplines. He
(01:14):
believes in the importance of transdisciplinarity. Professor Hugill hopefully won't
mind me saying that he has three invisible disabilities. He's
autistic, which in his case includes social and sensory issues,
but absolutely no learning difficulties. He has severe hearing loss
including tinnitus and diplacusis, and we will delve into those topics
(01:35):
a little bit more in Episode Two. And he has
Ménière's Disease, a balance disorder, which also caused the hearing
loss. Professor Hugill works actively in all of these areas
to improve lives of others with similar conditions. He also
founded the Aural Diversity Network, more on that shortly. Professor Hugill,
(01:56):
welcome and thank you for joining me for this podcast
series and I just want to touch on those invisible
difficulties a little bit later on because they fit in
very well with the theme for this series. So welcome.
Professor Hugill (02:08):
Thank you very much for that introduction.
Julia van Huyssteen (02:10):
My first question is related to a little bit of that introduction that I
gave earlier. Would you care to explain to our listeners
what aural diversity is about and what your role is
within that aural diversity piece?
Professor Hugill (02:23):
Well, it's fundamentally a very simple thing, which is an
observation that everybody hears differently. And I think this is
just factually true. If you think about the way that
the human ear is shaped, everybody's ear is unique to
themselves, bit like a fingerprint. The outer flaps certainly, and
(02:43):
even some aspects of the inner ear. And then of
course we're all at different stages in life and we all
have hearing that is in a state of transition to some
extent. Even things like blockages, if you have wax in
your ear or if you have a cold that day,
that changes the way you hear. Aural diversity is really
(03:03):
just a recognition of this diversity of hearing. Where this
becomes perhaps worth more scientific study is when you start
to realize how pervasive this is in relation to so-
called normal hearing. Normal hearing as everybody listening to this
will probably know, is defined by the set of experiments
(03:26):
performed on students in the 1950s, '60s, and they were in the
age range of 18 to 25. And these were all people who
had no disease, no impairment. They were healthy people both
ears working in a so- called normal way. And there
(03:46):
were experiments done to test their response, producing a set
of curves indicating that their response to sounds. And of
course what you realize quite quickly when you think about
this is that actually this is a very small group
of people. The healthy 18 to 25 year olds are about 17%
(04:06):
of the population. Everybody else doesn't hear like that. Even
within 18 to 25 year olds there's actually quite a
lot of variation, temporary variations of the kind I've mentioned,
but also in terms of hearing development. And so you
start to wonder why we are accepting otological normalcy based
(04:27):
on such a small sample group. And this is really
what aural diversity concerns itself with. What it's saying is
the vast majority of people have a different hearing to so-
called normal hearing. And we think that, or we argue
that this is not sufficiently acknowledged in the way that
the world is constructed, in the way that we think
(04:47):
about sound and hearing and listening. And almost any hearing and
listening situation is underpinned by a tacit assumption of normal
hearing. Audiology as the discipline has this as its primary
assumption. The audiogram has its level and there's normal and
if you are below that, you've got hearing loss or hearing
(05:09):
impairment. And I start to question this. There's all sorts
of ways of hearing, and they're not all measurable by
these methods. Once we've realized this simple observation, we then
start to look at the differences in hearing and how
they affect life, how they affect people. Really try to
(05:31):
get a sense of the scope of hearing difference and what
we can do about it in terms of acoustics, in
terms of design, in terms of creativity, art, in terms
of audiology and medicine. In fact, a whole range of
disciplines that this affects.
Julia van Huyssteen (05:49):
And I've got to hold my hand up, and I'm
physically holding my hand up for those that can't visualize
me, as an audiologist, guilty as charged. Until I've joined
the Aural Diversity group, I was very much one of
those audiologists that would simply define the level of the
hearing loss in terms of a category and not necessarily
think about all of these other influences that can change
(06:11):
your hearing experience. And I think your passions shines through
through what you've just discussed with us about aural diversity.
And in fact, it inspired you to start the Aural
Diversity Project in 2018, and that's because of also your
own experience of hearing loss and how that project has
actually been doing fantastic and growing really quickly because of
(06:33):
sponsorships from the likes of Arts Council England, the Arts
Humanities Research Council, Leverhulme Trust, et cetera. I would like
to explore with you what that project really stands for
and what it explores a little bit more.
Professor Hugill (06:47):
Sure. So as you commented earlier, my background's in music. For
most of my career in music, I really didn't take
any notice of hearing at all, and I think this
is true of a lot of musicians. And then in 2009 I
was diagnosed with Ménière's Disease, which is, it's a balance
disorder, but obviously because it affects the inner ear it
(07:09):
also affects your hearing. And I started to realize that
my work as a musician was going to be fundamentally
changed by this. Of course, there are various ways of
reacting to adversity. Mine has traditionally has always been creative.
I've tried to make something positive from challenges. So I
(07:29):
started to think how can I continue in music? The
other thing was I was, at the time, in charge
of a large research institute and I became quite concerned
that if I went public with my hearing changes and
my balance disorder, that this would affect my career in
a negative way. I think this is true for a
(07:51):
lot of musicians as well. If they have a hearing
problem, they tend to keep it quiet. It took me
probably about a decade to really open up about this.
I remember going to a conference at University of Leeds
organized by Professor Alinka Greasley, and there were people who
were deaf or who had various hearing differences, talking openly
(08:13):
in an academic setting, about their hearing. It just suddenly
struck me, why am I being so secretive about this?
I then started to talk about it and really that
was how the Aural Diversity Network began. John Drever, he'd
come up with this word " auraldiversity," all one word, a
bit like neurodiversity, and he joined me and we created
(08:37):
this network, which initially was we just had a conference
and a couple of concerts where we tried to perform
music by aurally divergent composers and musicians for aurally divergent
audience. The challenge was, okay, how can we create music
that could be heard by people like me basically? So
(08:58):
it was very embedded in my lived experience, but it
was also something that I thought had a wider interest,
a wider application. And although I'm not a hearing scientist, I
should make that clear, I'm not an audiologist, I've ended
up getting involved in these areas and I've addressed quite
a few audiology conferences and hearing science conferences and acoustics
(09:20):
conferences and you name it. I find myself talking to
very different groups of people from the ones I'm used to
and they all seem very engaged with this idea. It
is gaining tremendous traction. We've just been awarded a very
large, millions of pounds to set up a PhD research
center for aural diversity. It's really like a snowball going
(09:44):
down a hill, this thing.
Julia van Huyssteen (09:45):
Thank you as well again for sharing your personal experiences.
And I think earlier you mentioned that the age range
of 18 to 25, which is a very small proportion
of the people that we measure hearing to, and you
also talked about how atypical the representation is. And I
think scarily, if we look at the stats for the
(10:07):
future, the most recent report by the World Health Organization
predicts that by 2015, 1 in four people will actually
have a hearing loss. But that definition of hearing loss
should, as you've just discussed, go a lot further than
just the audiogram. And I think that is what's reflected in
that definition. So actually that one in four becomes a
(10:29):
much bigger proportion than just the one in four that
we talk about. Now, if we look at aural divergences
that you've already mentioned or talked about a little bit
or alluded to, that can be the result of lots
of different type of hearing differences or difficulties or impairments. But
actually it's really scary that when I did a bit
of research, it affects roughly 1. 1 billion people. And
(10:52):
this is not talking about the audiogram, this is talking
about aural divergences. That's a really large proportion of people,
and that's why I think we see this snowball effect
that you describe, is because suddenly people are starting to
realize but you can't just define somebody by a few
crosses and circles on a piece of paper. I found
(11:12):
on the Aural Diversity website, which by the way is
fantastic, anybody that is interested in getting more information, please
go and have a look at auraldiversity. org and I'll
mention it again at the end, it's brilliant, and I
found this wonderful infographic on the website that talks about
hearing differences in a very visual way. And I found it
really just made sense to me because there's some categories
(11:35):
and there's different groups of different categories and different colors
that just makes it all just connect together in a
way that if you are not following this conversation, will
really help you out. But it really gave me food
for thought, especially as an audiologist, and you've already mentioned
our occupation and ENTs and GPs and everybody that's got a medical
(11:56):
background that looks at hearing, it gave me food for
thought in terms of how complex our hearing really is
and how we traditionally want to simplify it. And even
explaining an audiogram to a patient, in my view, is
complex in itself. It doesn't make sense. If you've got
(12:17):
no experience of hearing and how to measure a hearing loss,
it's really difficult to take it in. And I think
we have to start to look at people's hearing experiences
and trying to translate it into what they tell us
during their case history. So we've got to try and
make it match up almost. Not to simplify it too
(12:38):
much, but also not to make it something that a person can
actually take away. And I think, let's talk a little
bit about disabilities and disorders and impairments and how we
can move away from just that or how that fits
into the conversation that we're having now.
Professor Hugill (12:55):
So the infographic that you've mentioned, it is an attempt
to map the scope of aural diversity and as you say, it's
done in a visual way that is hopefully quite ... It conveys
the complexity I think, but it also is quite easy
to follow. Probably we could use that as a sort of
template to help us talk through the issues you are
(13:18):
raising. On the infographic we have in the top right-
hand corner a set of what I've called universal variations.
And these are things that affect everybody. For example, ethnic
differences, socioeconomic differences, geographical differences. There's been large amounts of
(13:39):
studies done on this kind of thing showing that where
you live, your socioeconomic background, your ethnicity, affects your hearing.
There are variations between groups of people. So I think
everything we're going to say has to be seen within
the context of these universal variations. We can talk about
(14:00):
the numbers, but I've suggested roughly 5/ 6th of the
world's population following a typical path through life with regard
to hearing, and then about 1/ 6th of the population having
the kinds of differences that you've identified that are medically
named and could be medically identified. But clearly there's quite
(14:23):
a bit of overlap between these two groups. So the
numbers are not fixed. But if we consider a typical
person who goes through a so- called normal life, and
think about their hearing and the way it changes, first
of all in the fetus, hearing in the womb is
different to infant hearing. And in fact, there's quite a
(14:46):
lot of work being done on this at the moment
about the extent of difference in fetal listening. And then
when you are born, it takes about six months for
the hearing system to develop to the point at which
you can fully hear things in the way that we
would recognize as normal. So there's quite a considerable difference
(15:10):
there. And then we get to the teens and young
adults group that I've already talked about, and then after
that we come onto the group that you mentioned, which is
the vast majority of people who are not teens or
children, who are going through some kind of age- related
hearing change. We can call it presbycusis, we can call
(15:33):
it hearing loss. Essentially, it's your hearing changing over time.
And gradually, as we all know, you'd start to lose
the upper frequencies. Your ability to separate speech in a
crowded situation becomes constrained, and eventually probably you'll end up
(15:54):
wanting hearing aids to amplify sound and help you with
sound. And I've got a lot to say about technology.
We'll come onto that. But that is a traditional path.
But of course this doesn't happen in a fixed and
rigid way and everybody's at some point on that pathway
and there's a lot of variation as you go. So
even that has a great amount of diversity within it.
(16:17):
Then we come onto the other area of the infographic that
you've highlighted, which is the medically identifiable differences. And I
mean here we've got ones that I think most audiologists
would instantly know about and will be part of their
training. So sensory neural differences and conductive differences and mixed
(16:38):
conductive in sensory neural. So sensory neural being inner ear,
and as you said, this could be affected by anything
from genetics to drugs to trauma to disease, infection. And
then conductive issues, which can range from wax in the
ear to growths and some kind of compression of the ear and
(17:00):
inner ear physical compression, which changes the way that you hear.
That's much less common. That's about 10% of hearing difference.
Now, you'll notice that I've used the phrase difference or
the word difference throughout this. I haven't referred to loss,
I haven't referred to impairment, and generally in the Aural
Diversity Network, we try to avoid those words. Why would
(17:24):
we try to avoid them? You do lose hearing, there's
no doubt about it. There is loss of hearing. So
why would we want to avoid that word? I think
it's because of our understanding of aural diversity. Because another
really important part of this is to say that not
all forms of hearing difference involve loss of hearing. In
(17:45):
fact, a great number of them are the opposite of
that. They're actually an increase in hearing acuity. So if you
take a condition like hyperacusis for example, which is an
increased sensitivity to sound, this is heightened hearing. It's not
hearing loss. But in its way, it is just as
(18:07):
medically identifiable and as challenging for the individual as hearing
loss can be. I think this is pretty crucial area
of aural diversity really is this whole neurological and auditory
processing aspect. So how the brain interprets the incoming signal
(18:28):
and differences in that. And then of course, uniting all
of these, we have tinnitus, which remains a great challenge
for research, and I don't think we are there by
a long way, in terms of finding a cure for
tinnitus, and a lot of people would hope that we
would be. But tinnitus is the hearing of unwanted sound.
(18:51):
And I know when I go to have my hearing
test, I have great difficulty hearing the very quiet signals
that you are supposed to acknowledge, because of the tinnitus.
I can't sort out what is tinnitus and what is
not tinnitus. But of course the audiologist is not measuring
tinnitus at all. They're not actually interested in that. So
(19:13):
I have to try and somehow ignore the tinnitus and
respond to sounds that sound like tinnitus to me, but
apparently aren't. So that's quite challenging. I think tinnitus has
a big effect on everybody.
Julia van Huyssteen (19:28):
I really appreciate the fact that you try to avoid medicalized words like impairment
or deficit and defect. And I think you've already touched
on it, but let's talk a little bit about why
that is please.
Professor Hugill (19:40):
You'll recall that I mentioned John Drever and he invented the
word "auraldiversity" all one word, as a kind of parallel to
neurodiversity. And neurodiversity, I think, is quite a well- known
idea these days.
Julia van Huyssteen (19:54):
Yes.
Professor Hugill (19:54):
Neurodiversity emerged from the autistic community who were trying to
argue against a sort of pathologized view of autism. That
far from being a medical disability, it is in fact
just a state of being. It's the way you are.
(20:15):
The argument is that your brain is wired differently, if
you can put it like that, to a neurotypical brain.
This idea has really taken hold, I think. Autism, there
is quite a profound difference, I think, in the way
the brain functions. We still don't really fully understand this,
but we can observe some of the consequences of this
(20:37):
difference. But the idea of neurodiversity then becomes this way
of describing humans in general. Something people often forget, I
find, is that neurodiversity applies to everybody. Everybody is neurodiverse.
If we didn't have different brains from one another, we would all
be robots and we'd all think the same way. So
(21:00):
people say, " Oh, somebody is neurodiverse," but actually that's wrong.
They are neurodivergent meaning that they diverge from the predominant
neurotype. So autism would be a neurodivergence from the majority
who are not autistic. So it's an important semantic difference.
So when we come to aural diversity, what we have
(21:23):
here is that reverse in a way, what we're trying
to say is everybody hears differently, whereas all our audiology
and medicine tells us that there are specific people who
have hearing loss and who have hearing deficits, and they're the
focus of attention. And so we're trying to sort of
come at it the opposite way, but to the same
(21:43):
ends, really, which is to say, well, yes, sometimes this
involves hearing loss and I wouldn't want to do anything to
diminish the impact of that. You mentioned tinnitus. I personally know
a number of people who've taken their own lives because
of tinnitus. By using phrases like difference, I'm not seeking
to diminish the real consequences of these conditions. But I
(22:06):
also think we have to bear in mind the social
model of disability, which is that it's not me who's
disabled, it's the environment that I'm in that is disabling
to me. So speaking as an autistic person, I can
say that I heard the world in the way that
(22:26):
I heard it, and I became a composer and then
a professor of music very successfully using my hearing. And
all that time, I had no idea that I was
hearing the world differently from other people. And it's only
really in the last 10 years or so that it's dawned
on me that actually my hearing has always been very
(22:49):
unusual. So to give you some examples, I hear things that
other people tend not to notice. So I would hear
electricity, for example, in the walls. So I would hear
the sound of electricity in wires. I'd hear lighting. I'd
hear colors, and so I'm quite synesthetic, in other words,
(23:09):
certain sounds I hear as colors and certain colors I
can taste and so on. So the senses get muddled up. I
would listen to fridges and motorways and I would actually
notate them. I'd write them down as musical scores because
I felt that I could hear detail in them. There's
(23:32):
this tendency of autistic people to focus in intensely on
certain details, and this meant that when it came to
conducting an orchestra, I was very good at picking out
details. So if someone played out of tune at the
back of the second violins, I would hear them and I
would pick them out individually because I could hear that
level of detail. So you could say, well, I've got
(23:55):
fantastic hearing. This is much more acute hearing than other
people. Probably that's true, but then it becomes a form
of hyperacusis in the sense that there are other sounds that
I find very disturbing and that would be a problem for
me, and that has definitely increased as I've got older. We're
talking about a medically diagnosed condition that it is reckoned to
(24:19):
be a problem. I'm not so sure that it is a
problem. It is the way I am. It's only a
problem where my environment inflicts itself on me in such
a way that I can't function.
Julia van Huyssteen (24:31):
And again, as an audiologist, for me, it's really good
for me to absorb that that is something that autistic
people potentially could be exposed to. We are not saying everybody's
the same, of course that's not the point, but it's
something that we don't think about as audiologists. You simply
do your hearing test and you program the hearing aid
and you don't think about how you experience potentially the
(24:53):
world around you in a different way.
Professor Hugill (24:57):
I think that's right. An audiology test often will not detect
any hearing impairment or difference or loss or whatever. The
hearing will be completely normal, and yet the person they're
talking to is radically affected by the way they hear,
in a way that can be quite debilitating. Hand dryers
(25:19):
in toilets, we've all seen children putting their hands over
their ears in toilets because of the hand dryer sound,
right? That's because infant hearing hasn't developed to the robust
state that you get if you are a young adult. But for
autistic people, that's a permanent state and the sound of
hand dryers in toilets, I mean, I still run away if I
(25:42):
see hand dryers in toilets. And they are there in
most toilets these days, so it's hard to avoid them.
But they are painful to listen to in a way
that I think most people would just find them maybe
a bit annoying, but they just accept them. But for a lot
of autistic people, not all, but a lot of autistic
people, they are intolerable and it makes public toilets inaccessible
(26:07):
to us.
Julia van Huyssteen (26:09):
Yes, I agree with you, absolutely. I mean, they are
incredibly loud. They are, they really are. So it's uncomfortable
for most people, but of course intolerable for people that
have got hyperacusis or different experiences in loud sounds. I
think let's talk about technology to round it up a
little bit because that's also an important part of hearing
(26:30):
differences and what we've got available to assist us. And
I think there's lots of technologies now that involves different
types of listening or the way that you mentioned earlier,
using captions as well to help you assist with your
hearing when you were listening to somebody on screen or
whether it's a phone or whatever. So we've got things
(26:50):
like that. We've got apps that people can use. We've
got assistive listening devices. We've even now got big brands,
mobile phone brands like Samsung or Apple that embedded hearing
assessments within it, and that will give you some noise
reduction. Technology has absolutely boomed within the industry to do
(27:12):
with hearing. There's even some devices, and you might be
able to comment from personal experience here, that also helps
to give tinnitus advice and tinnitus therapy and tinnitus relief.
I wonder what your thoughts are on this and how
it links into all of this aural diversity that we've
been talking about.
Professor Hugill (27:27):
As you say, there's been an explosion of technology, particularly
digital technologies. I think perhaps my way of seeing this,
the Aural Diversity way of seeing this, is slightly different
to the way an audiologist might think about these technologies.
So the traditional idea would be, well, someone's got hearing
(27:48):
loss, let's help them to have better hearing by giving
them some kind of device that will amplify the sound
or in some way enhance the sound to make it
easier for them to hear. And the focus, particularly with
hearing aids, has been very much on speech, making speech
intelligible and communication, and obviously that's a very valuable thing.
(28:09):
But I see these technologies rather differently. To me, they
are all examples of aural diversity. Because what you have
in a hearing aid or a cochlear implant or a
hearable device of some kind, is an arranger of the soundscape.
This is something, a phrase that Mary (inaudible) who's
(28:30):
one of our researchers in the Aural Diversity Network that
she uses, " Soundscape arranger." What the device is doing is
not ... If you wear spectacles, it can correct your vision,
but if you wear hearing aids, it doesn't correct your
hearing. What it does is to give you a different
way of hearing the world. So it's working with what
(28:51):
your hearing mechanism can do, but it is translating that
into a different soundscape. So you have a completely engineered
digital soundscape that you are now hearing, that interposes itself
between you and the natural world, and this is true
for cochlear implants, it's true for anything. So now we
(29:11):
have an aural diversity. It is just a different way of hearing.
Sometimes it might be in some ways better than if
you didn't have the device, in other ways it might
be worse than if you didn't have the device. Cochlear
implants is a famous example of this, where for every
video of people weeping with joy when they could suddenly
(29:32):
hear for the first time, there are about 10 other
people where they switch on the cochlear implant and it's
just horrible gobbledygook noise, which their brain can't unscramble, and
eventually they end up switching it off and never using
it again. And then there's a whole question of deaf
identity. If you have a cochlear implant, are you still
deaf? And so this becomes a cultural issue as well
(29:55):
as a hearing issue, a technological issue. By the way,
I'm not at all against cochlear implants. I'm just pointing
out the range of diversity here. So all of these
things, to me, are part of aural diversity. They're all
differences in the way that you hear, and every person
who wears a hearing aid is now hearing in a
(30:17):
different way by definition. We can look at how that
works, but one thing that strikes me is that all
of these technologies pretty well without exception, are built on
this notion of normal hearing. At the root of it is
some kind of ideal hearing, which is this normal line
(30:39):
that is represented in the audiogram that is, we understand as
being the hearing of a healthy person aged 18 to 25. What's
interesting me about technology and the way I think Aural
Diversity as a project is influencing this now, is that
there people are starting to accept that is not the
ideal. That actually what you have to do is to
(31:01):
work to the hearing of the person, and that is going to
have a lot of variation and be different. You have
to work with that, and the idea isn't just simply to
correct it in some way and to make it as
near normal as you can get, and then job done.
It's actually to work with what you have and find
ways of listening and ways of hearing that the person
(31:24):
finds rewarding and pleasurable or all the good things, enhances
their quality of life and wellbeing.
Julia van Huyssteen (31:32):
I think you actually, you've brought it to a summary,
into a close, beautifully by just pulling it all together
in that last bit that you talked about. So I
think it's time to say super, super, duper thank you
to you, Professor Hugill. I've loved our conversations today. We've
(31:58):
heard today that individual hearing experiences are complex and can
be influenced by so many factors. This topic will be
interesting for anybody with an interest in hearing and for
those that have or had unique hearing differences. Any industry
associated with hearing in any way should really do some
introspection on how they can individualize communication, music, and environmental
(32:22):
sound experiences. In our next episode, Professor Hugill and I will explore
some more specific topics that causes hearing differences. And believe
me, there are some very interesting revelations. We talk tinnitus, diplacusis,
auditory processing disorder, and more. If you are interested in
any further information on Aural Diversity, you can connect with the
(32:43):
Aural Diversity Family on the website, auraldiversity. org. If you
found any of what you've heard today helpful, please tell
your friends, family, and colleagues, so as many people as
possible can share the knowledge. And if there is a
topic you think we should be covering, drop us an
email to the address on the show page. If you are just
discovering this series, we've already talked to legendary audiologist, Dr.
(33:05):
Gus Mueller about hearing aid fitting standards. And for series
two, we had four UK industry experts that talked about
audiology led wax removal here in the UK. We also
had Dr. Barbara Weinstein talking about the audiologist's role in
dementia. You can go back and download those previous episodes
for free wherever you get your podcast from. And remember
(33:26):
to follow so you don't miss any future episodes. This
is a Fresh Air production by Ollie Seymour for Signia
UK and Ireland. Until next time, goodbye and thank you.
Hello and welcome back to Sounding It Out, a podcast
dedicated to audiology and hearing health, brought to you by
Signia UK and Ireland. I'm Julia van Huyssteen your host,
and I'm delighted to be back with two new episodes.
And believe me, it was worth the wait. I am
the Head of Audiology at Signia UK and Ireland, and
hearing health is a super passion of mine. If you
(00:32):
know me, you'll definitely know these podcasts are Signia (inaudible)
so that everybody with an interest in hearing health or
audiology can benefit and enjoy them. So please do. For
this next series, we are going through some thought- provoking
explorations around individual experiences of hearing. My guest speaker for
this series is Professor Andrew Hugill, who is the Deputy
(00:54):
Director at the Institute for Digital Culture at the University
of Leicester, where he has also founded the Creative Computing
Program. His background is in music in which he's a
professor and he's an active composer and musicologist. Throughout his
career, he has worked across artistic and scientific disciplines. He
(01:14):
believes in the importance of transdisciplinarity. Professor Hugill hopefully won't
mind me saying that he has three invisible disabilities. He's
autistic, which in his case includes social and sensory issues,
but absolutely no learning difficulties. He has severe hearing loss
including tinnitus and diplacusis, and we will delve into those topics
(01:35):
a little bit more in Episode Two. And he has
Ménière's Disease, a balance disorder, which also caused the hearing
loss. Professor Hugill works actively in all of these areas
to improve lives of others with similar conditions. He also
founded the Aural Diversity Network, more on that shortly. Professor Hugill,
(01:56):
welcome and thank you for joining me for this podcast
series and I just want to touch on those invisible
difficulties a little bit later on because they fit in
very well with the theme for this series. So welcome.
Professor Hugill (02:08):
Thank you very much for that introduction.
Julia van Huyssteen (02:10):
My first question is related to a little bit of that introduction that I
gave earlier. Would you care to explain to our listeners
what aural diversity is about and what your role is
within that aural diversity piece?
Professor Hugill (02:23):
Well, it's fundamentally a very simple thing, which is an
observation that everybody hears differently. And I think this is
just factually true. If you think about the way that
the human ear is shaped, everybody's ear is unique to
themselves, bit like a fingerprint. The outer flaps certainly, and
(02:43):
even some aspects of the inner ear. And then of
course we're all at different stages in life and we all
have hearing that is in a state of transition to some
extent. Even things like blockages, if you have wax in
your ear or if you have a cold that day,
that changes the way you hear. Aural diversity is really
(03:03):
just a recognition of this diversity of hearing. Where this
becomes perhaps worth more scientific study is when you start
to realize how pervasive this is in relation to so-
called normal hearing. Normal hearing as everybody listening to this
will probably know, is defined by the set of experiments
(03:26):
performed on students in the 1950s, '60s, and they were in the
age range of 18 to 25. And these were all people who
had no disease, no impairment. They were healthy people both
ears working in a so- called normal way. And there
(03:46):
were experiments done to test their response, producing a set
of curves indicating that their response to sounds. And of
course what you realize quite quickly when you think about
this is that actually this is a very small group
of people. The healthy 18 to 25 year olds are about 17%
(04:06):
of the population. Everybody else doesn't hear like that. Even
within 18 to 25 year olds there's actually quite a
lot of variation, temporary variations of the kind I've mentioned,
but also in terms of hearing development. And so you
start to wonder why we are accepting otological normalcy based
(04:27):
on such a small sample group. And this is really
what aural diversity concerns itself with. What it's saying is
the vast majority of people have a different hearing to so-
called normal hearing. And we think that, or we argue
that this is not sufficiently acknowledged in the way that
the world is constructed, in the way that we think
(04:47):
about sound and hearing and listening. And almost any hearing and
listening situation is underpinned by a tacit assumption of normal
hearing. Audiology as the discipline has this as its primary
assumption. The audiogram has its level and there's normal and
if you are below that, you've got hearing loss or hearing
(05:09):
impairment. And I start to question this. There's all sorts
of ways of hearing, and they're not all measurable by
these methods. Once we've realized this simple observation, we then
start to look at the differences in hearing and how
they affect life, how they affect people. Really try to
(05:31):
get a sense of the scope of hearing difference and what
we can do about it in terms of acoustics, in
terms of design, in terms of creativity, art, in terms
of audiology and medicine. In fact, a whole range of
disciplines that this affects.
Julia van Huyssteen (05:49):
And I've got to hold my hand up, and I'm
physically holding my hand up for those that can't visualize
me, as an audiologist, guilty as charged. Until I've joined
the Aural Diversity group, I was very much one of
those audiologists that would simply define the level of the
hearing loss in terms of a category and not necessarily
think about all of these other influences that can change
(06:11):
your hearing experience. And I think your passions shines through
through what you've just discussed with us about aural diversity.
And in fact, it inspired you to start the Aural
Diversity Project in 2018, and that's because of also your
own experience of hearing loss and how that project has
actually been doing fantastic and growing really quickly because of
(06:33):
sponsorships from the likes of Arts Council England, the Arts
Humanities Research Council, Leverhulme Trust, et cetera. I would like
to explore with you what that project really stands for
and what it explores a little bit more.
Professor Hugill (06:47):
Sure. So as you commented earlier, my background's in music. For
most of my career in music, I really didn't take
any notice of hearing at all, and I think this
is true of a lot of musicians. And then in 2009 I
was diagnosed with Ménière's Disease, which is, it's a balance
disorder, but obviously because it affects the inner ear it
(07:09):
also affects your hearing. And I started to realize that
my work as a musician was going to be fundamentally
changed by this. Of course, there are various ways of
reacting to adversity. Mine has traditionally has always been creative.
I've tried to make something positive from challenges. So I
(07:29):
started to think how can I continue in music? The
other thing was I was, at the time, in charge
of a large research institute and I became quite concerned
that if I went public with my hearing changes and
my balance disorder, that this would affect my career in
a negative way. I think this is true for a
(07:51):
lot of musicians as well. If they have a hearing
problem, they tend to keep it quiet. It took me
probably about a decade to really open up about this.
I remember going to a conference at University of Leeds
organized by Professor Alinka Greasley, and there were people who
were deaf or who had various hearing differences, talking openly
(08:13):
in an academic setting, about their hearing. It just suddenly
struck me, why am I being so secretive about this?
I then started to talk about it and really that
was how the Aural Diversity Network began. John Drever, he'd
come up with this word " auraldiversity," all one word, a
bit like neurodiversity, and he joined me and we created
(08:37):
this network, which initially was we just had a conference
and a couple of concerts where we tried to perform
music by aurally divergent composers and musicians for aurally divergent
audience. The challenge was, okay, how can we create music
that could be heard by people like me basically? So
(08:58):
it was very embedded in my lived experience, but it
was also something that I thought had a wider interest,
a wider application. And although I'm not a hearing scientist, I
should make that clear, I'm not an audiologist, I've ended
up getting involved in these areas and I've addressed quite
a few audiology conferences and hearing science conferences and acoustics
(09:20):
conferences and you name it. I find myself talking to
very different groups of people from the ones I'm used to
and they all seem very engaged with this idea. It
is gaining tremendous traction. We've just been awarded a very
large, millions of pounds to set up a PhD research
center for aural diversity. It's really like a snowball going
(09:44):
down a hill, this thing.
Julia van Huyssteen (09:45):
Thank you as well again for sharing your personal experiences.
And I think earlier you mentioned that the age range
of 18 to 25, which is a very small proportion
of the people that we measure hearing to, and you
also talked about how atypical the representation is. And I
think scarily, if we look at the stats for the
(10:07):
future, the most recent report by the World Health Organization
predicts that by 2015, 1 in four people will actually
have a hearing loss. But that definition of hearing loss
should, as you've just discussed, go a lot further than
just the audiogram. And I think that is what's reflected in
that definition. So actually that one in four becomes a
(10:29):
much bigger proportion than just the one in four that
we talk about. Now, if we look at aural divergences
that you've already mentioned or talked about a little bit
or alluded to, that can be the result of lots
of different type of hearing differences or difficulties or impairments. But
actually it's really scary that when I did a bit
of research, it affects roughly 1. 1 billion people. And
(10:52):
this is not talking about the audiogram, this is talking
about aural divergences. That's a really large proportion of people,
and that's why I think we see this snowball effect
that you describe, is because suddenly people are starting to
realize but you can't just define somebody by a few
crosses and circles on a piece of paper. I found
(11:12):
on the Aural Diversity website, which by the way is
fantastic, anybody that is interested in getting more information, please
go and have a look at auraldiversity. org and I'll
mention it again at the end, it's brilliant, and I
found this wonderful infographic on the website that talks about
hearing differences in a very visual way. And I found it
really just made sense to me because there's some categories
(11:35):
and there's different groups of different categories and different colors
that just makes it all just connect together in a
way that if you are not following this conversation, will
really help you out. But it really gave me food
for thought, especially as an audiologist, and you've already mentioned
our occupation and ENTs and GPs and everybody that's got a medical
(11:56):
background that looks at hearing, it gave me food for
thought in terms of how complex our hearing really is
and how we traditionally want to simplify it. And even
explaining an audiogram to a patient, in my view, is
complex in itself. It doesn't make sense. If you've got
(12:17):
no experience of hearing and how to measure a hearing loss,
it's really difficult to take it in. And I think
we have to start to look at people's hearing experiences
and trying to translate it into what they tell us
during their case history. So we've got to try and
make it match up almost. Not to simplify it too
(12:38):
much, but also not to make it something that a person can
actually take away. And I think, let's talk a little
bit about disabilities and disorders and impairments and how we
can move away from just that or how that fits
into the conversation that we're having now.
Professor Hugill (12:55):
So the infographic that you've mentioned, it is an attempt
to map the scope of aural diversity and as you say, it's
done in a visual way that is hopefully quite ... It conveys
the complexity I think, but it also is quite easy
to follow. Probably we could use that as a sort of
template to help us talk through the issues you are
(13:18):
raising. On the infographic we have in the top right-
hand corner a set of what I've called universal variations.
And these are things that affect everybody. For example, ethnic
differences, socioeconomic differences, geographical differences. There's been large amounts of
(13:39):
studies done on this kind of thing showing that where
you live, your socioeconomic background, your ethnicity, affects your hearing.
There are variations between groups of people. So I think
everything we're going to say has to be seen within
the context of these universal variations. We can talk about
(14:00):
the numbers, but I've suggested roughly 5/ 6th of the
world's population following a typical path through life with regard
to hearing, and then about 1/ 6th of the population having
the kinds of differences that you've identified that are medically
named and could be medically identified. But clearly there's quite
(14:23):
a bit of overlap between these two groups. So the
numbers are not fixed. But if we consider a typical
person who goes through a so- called normal life, and
think about their hearing and the way it changes, first
of all in the fetus, hearing in the womb is
different to infant hearing. And in fact, there's quite a
(14:46):
lot of work being done on this at the moment
about the extent of difference in fetal listening. And then
when you are born, it takes about six months for
the hearing system to develop to the point at which
you can fully hear things in the way that we
would recognize as normal. So there's quite a considerable difference
(15:10):
there. And then we get to the teens and young
adults group that I've already talked about, and then after
that we come onto the group that you mentioned, which is
the vast majority of people who are not teens or
children, who are going through some kind of age- related
hearing change. We can call it presbycusis, we can call
(15:33):
it hearing loss. Essentially, it's your hearing changing over time.
And gradually, as we all know, you'd start to lose
the upper frequencies. Your ability to separate speech in a
crowded situation becomes constrained, and eventually probably you'll end up
(15:54):
wanting hearing aids to amplify sound and help you with
sound. And I've got a lot to say about technology.
We'll come onto that. But that is a traditional path.
But of course this doesn't happen in a fixed and
rigid way and everybody's at some point on that pathway
and there's a lot of variation as you go. So
even that has a great amount of diversity within it.
(16:17):
Then we come onto the other area of the infographic that
you've highlighted, which is the medically identifiable differences. And I
mean here we've got ones that I think most audiologists
would instantly know about and will be part of their
training. So sensory neural differences and conductive differences and mixed
(16:38):
conductive in sensory neural. So sensory neural being inner ear,
and as you said, this could be affected by anything
from genetics to drugs to trauma to disease, infection. And
then conductive issues, which can range from wax in the
ear to growths and some kind of compression of the ear and
(17:00):
inner ear physical compression, which changes the way that you hear.
That's much less common. That's about 10% of hearing difference.
Now, you'll notice that I've used the phrase difference or
the word difference throughout this. I haven't referred to loss,
I haven't referred to impairment, and generally in the Aural
Diversity Network, we try to avoid those words. Why would
(17:24):
we try to avoid them? You do lose hearing, there's
no doubt about it. There is loss of hearing. So
why would we want to avoid that word? I think
it's because of our understanding of aural diversity. Because another
really important part of this is to say that not
all forms of hearing difference involve loss of hearing. In
(17:45):
fact, a great number of them are the opposite of
that. They're actually an increase in hearing acuity. So if you
take a condition like hyperacusis for example, which is an
increased sensitivity to sound, this is heightened hearing. It's not
hearing loss. But in its way, it is just as
(18:07):
medically identifiable and as challenging for the individual as hearing
loss can be. I think this is pretty crucial area
of aural diversity really is this whole neurological and auditory
processing aspect. So how the brain interprets the incoming signal
(18:28):
and differences in that. And then of course, uniting all
of these, we have tinnitus, which remains a great challenge
for research, and I don't think we are there by
a long way, in terms of finding a cure for
tinnitus, and a lot of people would hope that we
would be. But tinnitus is the hearing of unwanted sound.
(18:51):
And I know when I go to have my hearing
test, I have great difficulty hearing the very quiet signals
that you are supposed to acknowledge, because of the tinnitus.
I can't sort out what is tinnitus and what is
not tinnitus. But of course the audiologist is not measuring
tinnitus at all. They're not actually interested in that. So
(19:13):
I have to try and somehow ignore the tinnitus and
respond to sounds that sound like tinnitus to me, but
apparently aren't. So that's quite challenging. I think tinnitus has
a big effect on everybody.
Julia van Huyssteen (19:28):
I really appreciate the fact that you try to avoid medicalized words like impairment
or deficit and defect. And I think you've already touched
on it, but let's talk a little bit about why
that is please.
Professor Hugill (19:40):
You'll recall that I mentioned John Drever and he invented the
word "auraldiversity" all one word, as a kind of parallel to
neurodiversity. And neurodiversity, I think, is quite a well- known
idea these days.
Julia van Huyssteen (19:54):
Yes.
Professor Hugill (19:54):
Neurodiversity emerged from the autistic community who were trying to
argue against a sort of pathologized view of autism. That
far from being a medical disability, it is in fact
just a state of being. It's the way you are.
(20:15):
The argument is that your brain is wired differently, if
you can put it like that, to a neurotypical brain.
This idea has really taken hold, I think. Autism, there
is quite a profound difference, I think, in the way
the brain functions. We still don't really fully understand this,
but we can observe some of the consequences of this
(20:37):
difference. But the idea of neurodiversity then becomes this way
of describing humans in general. Something people often forget, I
find, is that neurodiversity applies to everybody. Everybody is neurodiverse.
If we didn't have different brains from one another, we would all
be robots and we'd all think the same way. So
(21:00):
people say, " Oh, somebody is neurodiverse," but actually that's wrong.
They are neurodivergent meaning that they diverge from the predominant
neurotype. So autism would be a neurodivergence from the majority
who are not autistic. So it's an important semantic difference.
So when we come to aural diversity, what we have
(21:23):
here is that reverse in a way, what we're trying
to say is everybody hears differently, whereas all our audiology
and medicine tells us that there are specific people who
have hearing loss and who have hearing deficits, and they're the
focus of attention. And so we're trying to sort of
come at it the opposite way, but to the same
(21:43):
ends, really, which is to say, well, yes, sometimes this
involves hearing loss and I wouldn't want to do anything to
diminish the impact of that. You mentioned tinnitus. I personally know
a number of people who've taken their own lives because
of tinnitus. By using phrases like difference, I'm not seeking
to diminish the real consequences of these conditions. But I
(22:06):
also think we have to bear in mind the social
model of disability, which is that it's not me who's
disabled, it's the environment that I'm in that is disabling
to me. So speaking as an autistic person, I can
say that I heard the world in the way that
(22:26):
I heard it, and I became a composer and then
a professor of music very successfully using my hearing. And
all that time, I had no idea that I was
hearing the world differently from other people. And it's only
really in the last 10 years or so that it's dawned
on me that actually my hearing has always been very
(22:49):
unusual. So to give you some examples, I hear things that
other people tend not to notice. So I would hear
electricity, for example, in the walls. So I would hear
the sound of electricity in wires. I'd hear lighting. I'd
hear colors, and so I'm quite synesthetic, in other words,
(23:09):
certain sounds I hear as colors and certain colors I
can taste and so on. So the senses get muddled up. I
would listen to fridges and motorways and I would actually
notate them. I'd write them down as musical scores because
I felt that I could hear detail in them. There's
(23:32):
this tendency of autistic people to focus in intensely on
certain details, and this meant that when it came to
conducting an orchestra, I was very good at picking out
details. So if someone played out of tune at the
back of the second violins, I would hear them and I
would pick them out individually because I could hear that
level of detail. So you could say, well, I've got
(23:55):
fantastic hearing. This is much more acute hearing than other
people. Probably that's true, but then it becomes a form
of hyperacusis in the sense that there are other sounds that
I find very disturbing and that would be a problem for
me, and that has definitely increased as I've got older. We're
talking about a medically diagnosed condition that it is reckoned to
(24:19):
be a problem. I'm not so sure that it is a
problem. It is the way I am. It's only a
problem where my environment inflicts itself on me in such
a way that I can't function.
Julia van Huyssteen (24:31):
And again, as an audiologist, for me, it's really good
for me to absorb that that is something that autistic
people potentially could be exposed to. We are not saying everybody's
the same, of course that's not the point, but it's
something that we don't think about as audiologists. You simply
do your hearing test and you program the hearing aid
and you don't think about how you experience potentially the
(24:53):
world around you in a different way.
Professor Hugill (24:57):
I think that's right. An audiology test often will not detect
any hearing impairment or difference or loss or whatever. The
hearing will be completely normal, and yet the person they're
talking to is radically affected by the way they hear,
in a way that can be quite debilitating. Hand dryers
(25:19):
in toilets, we've all seen children putting their hands over
their ears in toilets because of the hand dryer sound,
right? That's because infant hearing hasn't developed to the robust
state that you get if you are a young adult. But for
autistic people, that's a permanent state and the sound of
hand dryers in toilets, I mean, I still run away if I
(25:42):
see hand dryers in toilets. And they are there in
most toilets these days, so it's hard to avoid them.
But they are painful to listen to in a way
that I think most people would just find them maybe
a bit annoying, but they just accept them. But for a lot
of autistic people, not all, but a lot of autistic
people, they are intolerable and it makes public toilets inaccessible
(26:07):
to us.
Julia van Huyssteen (26:09):
Yes, I agree with you, absolutely. I mean, they are
incredibly loud. They are, they really are. So it's uncomfortable
for most people, but of course intolerable for people that
have got hyperacusis or different experiences in loud sounds. I
think let's talk about technology to round it up a
little bit because that's also an important part of hearing
(26:30):
differences and what we've got available to assist us. And
I think there's lots of technologies now that involves different
types of listening or the way that you mentioned earlier,
using captions as well to help you assist with your
hearing when you were listening to somebody on screen or
whether it's a phone or whatever. So we've got things
(26:50):
like that. We've got apps that people can use. We've
got assistive listening devices. We've even now got big brands,
mobile phone brands like Samsung or Apple that embedded hearing
assessments within it, and that will give you some noise
reduction. Technology has absolutely boomed within the industry to do
(27:12):
with hearing. There's even some devices, and you might be
able to comment from personal experience here, that also helps
to give tinnitus advice and tinnitus therapy and tinnitus relief.
I wonder what your thoughts are on this and how
it links into all of this aural diversity that we've
been talking about.
Professor Hugill (27:27):
As you say, there's been an explosion of technology, particularly
digital technologies. I think perhaps my way of seeing this,
the Aural Diversity way of seeing this, is slightly different
to the way an audiologist might think about these technologies.
So the traditional idea would be, well, someone's got hearing
(27:48):
loss, let's help them to have better hearing by giving
them some kind of device that will amplify the sound
or in some way enhance the sound to make it
easier for them to hear. And the focus, particularly with
hearing aids, has been very much on speech, making speech
intelligible and communication, and obviously that's a very valuable thing.
(28:09):
But I see these technologies rather differently. To me, they
are all examples of aural diversity. Because what you have
in a hearing aid or a cochlear implant or a
hearable device of some kind, is an arranger of the soundscape.
This is something, a phrase that Mary (inaudible) who's
(28:30):
one of our researchers in the Aural Diversity Network that
she uses, " Soundscape arranger." What the device is doing is
not ... If you wear spectacles, it can correct your vision,
but if you wear hearing aids, it doesn't correct your
hearing. What it does is to give you a different
way of hearing the world. So it's working with what
(28:51):
your hearing mechanism can do, but it is translating that
into a different soundscape. So you have a completely engineered
digital soundscape that you are now hearing, that interposes itself
between you and the natural world, and this is true
for cochlear implants, it's true for anything. So now we
(29:11):
have an aural diversity. It is just a different way of hearing.
Sometimes it might be in some ways better than if
you didn't have the device, in other ways it might
be worse than if you didn't have the device. Cochlear
implants is a famous example of this, where for every
video of people weeping with joy when they could suddenly
(29:32):
hear for the first time, there are about 10 other
people where they switch on the cochlear implant and it's
just horrible gobbledygook noise, which their brain can't unscramble, and
eventually they end up switching it off and never using
it again. And then there's a whole question of deaf
identity. If you have a cochlear implant, are you still
deaf? And so this becomes a cultural issue as well
(29:55):
as a hearing issue, a technological issue. By the way,
I'm not at all against cochlear implants. I'm just pointing
out the range of diversity here. So all of these
things, to me, are part of aural diversity. They're all
differences in the way that you hear, and every person
who wears a hearing aid is now hearing in a
(30:17):
different way by definition. We can look at how that
works, but one thing that strikes me is that all
of these technologies pretty well without exception, are built on
this notion of normal hearing. At the root of it is
some kind of ideal hearing, which is this normal line
(30:39):
that is represented in the audiogram that is, we understand as
being the hearing of a healthy person aged 18 to 25. What's
interesting me about technology and the way I think Aural
Diversity as a project is influencing this now, is that
there people are starting to accept that is not the
ideal. That actually what you have to do is to
(31:01):
work to the hearing of the person, and that is going to
have a lot of variation and be different. You have
to work with that, and the idea isn't just simply to
correct it in some way and to make it as
near normal as you can get, and then job done.
It's actually to work with what you have and find
ways of listening and ways of hearing that the person
(31:24):
finds rewarding and pleasurable or all the good things, enhances
their quality of life and wellbeing.
Julia van Huyssteen (31:32):
I think you actually, you've brought it to a summary,
into a close, beautifully by just pulling it all together
in that last bit that you talked about. So I
think it's time to say super, super, duper thank you
to you, Professor Hugill. I've loved our conversations today. We've
(31:58):
heard today that individual hearing experiences are complex and can
be influenced by so many factors. This topic will be
interesting for anybody with an interest in hearing and for
those that have or had unique hearing differences. Any industry
associated with hearing in any way should really do some
introspection on how they can individualize communication, music, and environmental
(32:22):
sound experiences. In our next episode, Professor Hugill and I will explore
some more specific topics that causes hearing differences. And believe
me, there are some very interesting revelations. We talk tinnitus, diplacusis,
auditory processing disorder, and more. If you are interested in
any further information on Aural Diversity, you can connect with the
(32:43):
Aural Diversity Family on the website, auraldiversity. org. If you
found any of what you've heard today helpful, please tell
your friends, family, and colleagues, so as many people as
possible can share the knowledge. And if there is a
topic you think we should be covering, drop us an
email to the address on the show page. If you are just
discovering this series, we've already talked to legendary audiologist, Dr.
(33:05):
Gus Mueller about hearing aid fitting standards. And for series
two, we had four UK industry experts that talked about
audiology led wax removal here in the UK. We also
had Dr. Barbara Weinstein talking about the audiologist's role in
dementia. You can go back and download those previous episodes
for free wherever you get your podcast from. And remember
(33:26):
to follow so you don't miss any future episodes. This
is a Fresh Air production by Ollie Seymour for Signia
UK and Ireland. Until next time, goodbye and thank you.
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