Designing an Instrument for the deaf and HOH

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jagdesign

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Hi

I should probably introduce myself as this is my first post here. My name is James and I'm a Product Design student at Loughborough University in the UK.

As part of our final year on this course we have to undertake a major project which involves the designing and prototyping a product of our choice.

I am a huge fan of music myself and play/try to play the guitar when possible! After doing a bit of research and realising that deaf and HOH people still love listening to and playing music, I'm looking to design an instrument specifically but not exclusively for deaf and HOH users. The initial insight came from Evelyn Glennie's talk on TED.com, Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen | Video on TED.com

I have an idea at the moment which unfortunately I can't go in to detail about. For now I'd really appreciate any comments anyone has about what it's like to play an instrument as a deaf or HOH person. Also, it would be great to hear how the experience varies between those who were born deaf and those who lost their hearing later in life.

Like Glennie, is there anyone here who uses the vibration feedback from an instrument to hear what is being played? It has been stated that Glennie was/is able to tell which note is being played by touching a wall in the same room. Can anyone here do this?

Any comments would be really appreciated. I'm genuinely passionate about delivering a solution which can help deaf people to learn and play music, I hope you can help : )

Cheers!
 
Hey, Great idea!
I have been working with my synthesizers in the same way to find which way is best for playing piano/synthesizer with a severe/profound hearing loss. I can not hear frequencies below 250hz or above 3kHz at 90db. I have tried playing my keyboards through my Icom which works great for a piano sound, but not much else. I also use un-attenuated DAI cables with receiver earmolds that bring volume to sound but rattle a lot due to the high gain. I also tried sitting on my amp speaker while I play but it only helps with feeling the beat and the bass notes , but not helping me tell which note is which. I have perfect intonation as long as the sound is loud enough for me to hear. I also use a QX-3 sequencer from 1986 the has a "Midi Monitor" job command and the literally shows you the note name, gate time ratio, and the velocity of every incoming note as it happens. I cant tell the difference between bass notes or high notes, they disappear after a certain point and some sound the same in pitch so I use the midi monitor command to know for sure that I am playing the same notes that are an octave apart, like C1 and C2. Without seeing it, I would not be able to tell the difference of C1 and E2 as far as pitch goes, they would sound the same.
Anyway I also work with waveforms on my synthesizers and program sounds from a square wave into other sounds like strings and basses and synth leads. Each sound is at maximum level of 100 in the Time Varient Amp (the last stage in an ADSR ENV) and the velocity is set at 0% to help with full sound. Anyway I always design my sounds to my hearing range and also use the EQ processor on my Roland D-50 synthesizer to keep sound as strong as possible and at equalized frequencies (nothing below 250 or above 3K, same as my hearing range). I have also researched the hearing aids that I have and I take into account what frequencies they are capable of handling and whether or not sounds would be canceled or amplified beyond recognition. I have Phonak Naida V UP hearing aids that they are GREAT for bass notes, but the higher notes either disappear or have a ring-modulation effect. They are also transposed down into a freq range that I can hear. They are wonderful and bring a lot of sounds that I have never heard before and many that I have forgotten.
Anyway I think that it is a great idea to design instruments that can be played by ppl with hearing loss and also maybe work with hearing aids to maybe one day incoporate hearing aids into the signal processing. We never know what will happen in the future. Exciting stuff.
I really hope that they invent hearing aids that are specifically designed for music only.
Great topic!
Keep playin loud! :)
 
Thanks for the detailed reply, really helpful!

You mentioned you can't tell the difference between notes when you're sitting on your amps speaker. If you don't mind, would you be able to carry out a quick experiment for me? I don't know if you can physically touch the speaker in your amp, but if so, could you place a finger on the speaker and play some different notes, then report back as to whether you can feel the difference in vibration with each note.

That would be a great help : )

Cheers

James
 
Ok. I am back. I have done a few different experiments in the studio and have a list of notes. The two keyboards that I used for this is a Roland A-90 weighted hammer action electronic piano with 88 keys. The other is a Yamaha Motif 6 production synthesizer. One has heavy velocity sensitive keys and the other light weight synth action keys. Both send velocity info differently and effect sound differently. I had my amp and speaker on the ground and not on a stand. The grill of the speaker was taken off and the speaker cone and coil were exposed. This is a paper like material and so touching it lightly gave plenty of feedback without stopping the cone from moving. Sound 1 was a standard piano sound. I turned my hearing aids off so that I could only feel the notes and not hear it. I noticed that the lower register of the keyboard felt louder than the upper half because of the frequency of pitch. The lower notes are naturally louder and produce fewer vibrations or HZ per second and had a slower moving waveform who's "beats" could be easily felt. The higher I played up the keyboard on both keyboards, the less you can feel it and the shorter the vibrations were. At all times I could feel the attack of the sound, the ADSR of a sound is set of parameters for how a sound will behave from beginning to end. The attack,decay,sustain and release. I could feel the whole note fade in 3 to 4 seconds and then the higher notes above middle C fade in less and less time the higher the note was. The lower notes gave more tactile fedback than the higher ones obviously. So playing a song with chords and a lead on piano would be a little tricky but not impossible to do because the is lots of feedback from the lower notes but much less from the higher ones. A player could use and keep time with the lower frequencies (chords) and then rely on reading the notations for accuracy in both bass and treble clefs. I also tried a bass sound which was very powerful and almost annoying to feel its vibrations through the fingers on the cone itself because its cone is moving much faster and more dramatically the lower the pitch goes. The higher frequencies leave the speaker through two smaller tweeters as they are called and those do not give off much feedback at all. I also tried an Organ sound called (16+8+5&1/3) this is an organ sound whose title refers to the organ stops of an organ. Its sound was thick and powerful with the sound of 2 oscillators tuned 1 octave apart and gave off a lot of vibrations from C1 all the way to C5. I could also feel the Leslie speaker rotation effect on the sound which is an LFO or low frequency oscillator, one the be felt and not heard by most hearing people. Its frequency is about 20Hz to 100Hz or so. So you can feel its effect on the speaker and hear it modulating the sound to imitate a rotating speaker cabinet much like the real organ does. This effect wont help in knowing the pitch of the note, but lets you know how long you can hold the note for, like you can hold the note for 3 cycles of the "leslie speaker" type of LFO and then move to other notes or divide notes. You can tell what type of sound you have by the way the vibrations feel. Lots of them feel similar though. A piano has a strong and short attack and you can feel on the speaker's cone, an Xylophone has a milder softer feeling attack to it with a smooth fading ADSR. A bass has a strong attack and a moderately strong decay time. I also noticed that you can use the natural characteristics of waveforms to help with note consonance and dissonance but there is some tricky things about it though. For instance if you play the notes C and D together at the same time, then there is a natural "beat" that can be felt, the two frequencies moving in and out of sync with each other. This is due to the structure of each frequency. C3 is 130.813 Hz and D3 is 146.832 Hz. These two frequencies are too close in spectrum to each other and do not mix well. It causes an irritating sound as well as a jittery unsettled vibration. Playing two notes a 5th apart such as C3- 130.813 and G3-195.998 Hz are far enough apart to not be too similar in frequency and make for a congruent type of sound like they fit together well. A triad or 3 note chord such as C,E,G (C major chord) fits well together but there is still a noticeable texture to it as the notes fit together but move at differing frequencies that can feel like they dont fit together when they really do. Knowing how to tell dissonant notes apart form well formed chords is difficult and tricky to do by touch. I think that with practice and some other tactile way of feeling what the speaker is outputting, a person may be able to learn which "beats" of which frequencies go together and which ones don't. Also knowing some music theory would also help too. There are lots of books that show the picture of the keys with the chords on it and show the chord name as well.

Also use of a midi sequencer could be helpful too for a visual representation of note values and velocity values. I have an old Yamaha QX3 and I use it everyday in my studio for recording my performance into midi for future playback as well as midi monitoring that can be great for seeing the displayed note value, velocity and gate time ratio. So there is a definate visual way to check if notes are the same pitch in different octaves. I can not hear bass sounds so I never know if my notes are in pitch or note, same with the high ones, so being able to check and see that i have played C2 and C3, not C2 and B3 is a life saver. lol I can also program my Korg EMX drum sequencer without mistake using the QX3's midi monitor function.
Anyway had fun with this experiment! Hope I made some sense! lol :)
Let me know if there is anything that I can explain more clearly.
Have a great day and keep the music loud!! :)
 
Wow! Thanks so much for doing that.

I need to digest it properly, but there are some really useful findings in there. A couple of questions before I go; how much of your playing are you able to hear with your hearing aids switched on? And this may be a slightly difficult question to answer, but do you know how loud your speakers normally are in dB?

Once again, thanks for your time.

James
 
Hi !! Glad it made sense! I tend to write a lot. :)
With my hearing aids in I can hear from C3 (130.813)Hz, to C6 (1046.50) kHz. Notes that are close to those notes start sounding out-of-tune and I can't tell what note I am hearing. Notes that are to the more extreme end of the low frequencies and high frequencies are gone and just disappear. The 27 lower keys below C3 are just noise and vibrations. Notes above C6, the last 24 keys at the high end of the keyboard are all gone and to me it feels like my keyboard is broken even though my hearing friend can hear all the notes. I have Phonak Naida V UP hearing aids and they transpose frequencies that I can't hear into ones that I can hear, very cool technology. Also during my hearing test frequencies starting at 1.5 to 2 kHz have to be 110 db and keep going but the machine stops at 130db. I think that I have cochlear dead regions at 3 kHz to 8kHz at it can never be loud enough for me to hear those. My powered amp outputs 115db max and can use 1 or 2 external speakers. The speakers are 2 and 1/2 feet tall. Without my hearing aids, my amp is on pretty loud. Loud enough to be uncomfortably loud for my hearing friend. lol One time cops came to the door because my sister had the amp on too loud. Oops! lol
So, we try to use other cables and hearing aid cables to use through the amp. I also use monitor headphones that are 100db sensitive but when I use them, the drivers inside rattle around and its still not loud enough for me to really enjoy a clean sound. Its frustrating. The only time I can hear a nice loud and clean sound is with a monitor speaker at ear level and above 120db and the other speakers in the sound field that is close enough.
Anyway I need to get a meter for DB and test different things and see what level of DB works best. I know that 85dB is not very loud to me. I also was being silly and was changing a battery in my fire alarm and tested it with it right next to my ear and took one hearing aid out and kept the other in and it was not near loud enough. It sounded like a pager. lol My friend was telling me that it was hurting her ears and that it was too loud for her. It was crazy to know that something that is pretty quiet to me but is too loud for others. My poor friend was mad at me. lol I have a silent call alarm that i use now. Also a grand piano is 80 to 90 dB loud and is pretty quiet to me too. I started noticing that it sounded quiet to me and I was a little depressed about that. I love playing the grand piano but I have to have my hearing aids on.
Anyway I really enjoyed the experiment. :)
Great talking to you and look forward to talking with you more about music. Do you play music yourself? It would be neat to hear your compositions. :)
Have a great day!
 
Hi guys,
I'm Sze, a student from Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. I'm now studying in Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama as an exchange student.
I'm so glad to know you are doing the projects just similar to mine. I'm doing my FYP about a device for hearing-impaired to experience music. Basically it will be a vibrating chair with lighting techniques. I have been working on this for few months.
As I'm now studying in Scotland, I tried to know more about the techniques or deaf cultures here. I will meet a deaf musician later to know more about the meaning of music to hearing-impaired people.
Also, i was kind of inspired by Evelyn Glennie also. I'm so glad to know you were. Do you know she is going to have a concert on 26 Nov2009, in Cadogan Hall,London. I bought a ticket to go!
How's your work going? may be we can share a little bit more. or, may be we can meet somewhere in UK.

Cheers,
Sze
 
Nice to meet you Sze. Hope your project goes well. Very interesting to read about. I wanted to mention to you guys that I did another kind of experiment with my synthesizers and the TV. LOL I hooked up a Roland D-50 which is a Linear Arithmetic synthesizer (subtractive) and I connected the line out (left mono out) into the phones jack of the TV. I noticed some neat observations. When pressing a key down, there is a visual interference that happens between the synthesizer and the tv. According to FFC rules, they both have to accept that interference even if it results in unwanted operation,really cool light shows! lol Anyway as long as the key (any note) is held down, there are horizontal light bars that scroll up the tv screen. The bars become much brighter in color if the volume of the synthesizer is set higher, lower makes darker bands of light. Changes in pitch look different too. High pitched notes cause dense sections of thin lines close together, this is representing the cycles per second, similar to a simple oscilloscope. Lower frequencies make a thick solid color band of light that moves slowly up the screen because there are less cycles per second that make up the frequency spectrum of that particular sound. Modulation also looks different. A sound with a strong LFO (low frequency oscillator) will cause a change in movement of the bands of light. I noticed that almost every aspect of sound will cause a unique change in the light bands and how the TV accepts the interference from the synthesizer. The TV omits no sound because the synthesizer's output line doesn't have a strong enough voltage to power the TV's speakers, a power amp would be needed. I also noticed the when I programmed my synthesizer's waveforms to be of a high pitch that is not easily heard, the voltages were still there on the screen. Anyway I had fun with this experiment, I was also bored that day and wanted to see what would happen! LOL
Anyway, it was nice to meet you and I hope that you have fun with your project. If you want, you can view some of my music that I write. It can be found under "jumelle music" in the search field of YouTube. I have been writing music since I was 6 years old and I have never stopped writing music even when I lost more hearing. I also am a synthesizer programmer as well. Got to have those waveforms!
Do let us know how your project goes. Have a great day!
 
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