The roar of a train, the laughter of children, the swell of a symphony. All are colorful aspects of daily life that are communicated to us via our sense of hearing. Hearing is an important asset that helps us respond to and interact with the world around us. Age-related hearing loss is a pervasive problem that often affects older adults’ quality of life. Such hearing loss can make it difficult to perform everyday tasks, such as determining where a sound is coming from, distinguishing speech from background noise, and understanding emotions conveyed in speech—all of which can lead to isolation and depression. Over the last few years, researchers in the SMART (Science of Music, Auditory Research, and Technology) lab at Ryerson University have become especially interested in the interaction between hearing loss and perception of emotion from auditory cues.
|Hearing is an important asset to help us respond to and interact with the world.|
|It is important to investigate the effects of hearing aids on perception of emotion in speech.|
|Musical emotion differs from spoken emotion in some important ways.|
While musical emotions rely on some of the same prosodic cues as spoken emotions (dynamic range, pitch contour, speed), musical emotion differs from spoken emotion in some important ways. Emotions in music are often redundantly coded, meaning that multiple emotional features are present at once. For example, a “sad” musical passage may be simultaneously soft, slow, and low in pitch. Since instrumental musical passages are lacking in the semantic content of emotional speech (the words we speak, which may give clues to the emotion we are attempting to convey), the emotions presented in music need to be more exaggerated to be distinguishable to the audience. All this might mean that it should be easier for hearing impaired and hearing aided individuals to parse musical emotion compared with spoken emotion. However, it is also possible that recruitment and dynamic range compression may make it more difficult for hearing impaired and hearing aided individuals to appreciate the emotion conveyed by music, which, especially in the classical genre, relies on a wide dynamic range from pianissimo to fortissimo.
|Parsing emotion is a key part of speech communication and musical enjoyment|
While these results are preliminary, it appears from our recent work that hearing aids are beneficial for those with hearing loss in understanding emotional cues from speech and music. This is encouraging, as parsing emotion is a key part of speech communication as well as musical enjoyment. More research remains to be done to investigate if there is a way to improve hearing aid technology to further increase emotional understanding.
Fanelli, D., Good, A., & Russo, F.A. (unpublished). Perception of Emotion in
Music by Hearing-Impaired and Hearing-Aided Listeners. Paper
submitted in 2017 for partial fulfillment of the requirements of an
undergraduate thesis project at Ryerson University. Toronto, ON.Goy, H., Pichora-Fuller, M. K., Singh, G., & Russo, F. A. (2016). Perception
of emotional speech by listeners with hearing aids. Proceedings of Acoustics
Week in Canada. Canadian Acoustics, 44, 182-183, Vancouver, BC.Nespoli, G., Singh, G., & Russo, F.A. (2016). Skin conductance responses to
emotional speech in hearing-impaired and hearing-aided listeners.
Proceedings of Acoustics Week in Canada. Canadian Acoustics, 44,
184-185, Vancouver, BC.Singh, G., Liskovoi, L., Launer, S., & Russo, F.A (submitted). The Emotional
Communication in Hearing Questionnaire (EMO-CHeQ): Development
Rachel is a fourth-year undergraduate at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she is studying music and biology. During summer 2017 she volunteered as a research assistant in the SMART Lab.
Edited by: Dr. Frank Russo
Formatted by: Fran Copelli
Also published in HearingHealthMatters.org on Tuesday, July 25, 2017.