Music

Many people with hearing impairment are keen music listeners, however they can show a preference for less complex types of music [1]. Highly complex music, such as orchestral scores can be less pleasant for listeners than simpler music such as folk songs. This project would focus on understanding and measuring the music preferences (focussing on complexity) of hearing-impaired or aurally diverse listeners, and then developing methods that can re-process or re-mix existing music to make it more suitable and appealing for these listeners. This work would build on work undertaken by the S3A project which aimed to use object-based audio to alter audio complexity in TV [2].

[1] Jo, S., Yun, J., Kyong, J. S., Shin, Y., & Kim, J. (2023). Music Perception Abilities of the Hearing Amplification System Users. Journal of Audiology & Otology, 27(2), 78. https://doi.org/10.7874/JAO.2022.00367

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2018-01-accessibility-object-based-media

Supervisors: Rebecca Vos and Alan Williams

This project investigates aural diversity in terms of intentional differences in the experience of consciousness in which music can be said to play a role. Music’s ability to induce or accompany altered states of consciousness (ASCs) has been anecdotally observed for millennia, often—though not always—as part of suites of ritual practices that also involve the ingestion of psychoactive substances. Reasons for seeking these states range from the sacred to the profane, and the desired effects from trancing to tripping and everything in between. In some poststructuralist and new materialist accounts, the consciousness experienced when listening to music of any kind is considered categorically different from rational, symbolic (logocentric) cognition, though these claims—while philosophically seductive—often exaggerate this difference and/or rely on unsound models of auditory perception. Scholarly investigations into music’s role in facilitating ASCs specifically are patchy, located in disparate corners of disciplines including anthropology, medicine, cognitive science, psychology, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies. Within this diffuse body of work, little consensus exists around why or how certain musical features can activate or amplify different ways of experiencing the world, and to what extent this is attributable to the aural aspects of the music or to interactions with substance use and other practices. As such, understandings of musically adjacent ASCs remain limited, despite their cultural ubiquity.

To this end, this project seeks (1) to build bridges between siloed understandings of music and/as ASCs by facilitating transdisciplinary translation; (2) the development of novel methods for accessing insight into these often clandestine practices; and (3) the disentangling of the effects of different musical parameters, styles, and paramusical factors on the physiological and phenomenal qualities of the diverse range of altered states that music makes possible. Possible approaches could include corpus-driven analyses of linguistic representations of musically adjacent ASCs, testing of listener responses to musical stimuli, music analysis, ethnographic observation, and so on.

Supervisors: Dr Maria Perevedentseva, Dr Sam Royle

The enjoyment of live performances is highly dependent on the aural experience in the audience. This project focuses on strategies to deliver appropriate audio content to audiences with diverse aural profiles. Some of these strategies might investigate the use of different live sound zones across an audience or the use of augmented audio targeting specific individuals. Appropriate knowledge of live sound reproduction engineering as well as audio signal processing are desirable skills for this project.

Supervisors: Adam Hart and Bruno Fazenda