♪ Opening theme music ♪
Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists, academics, and project leaders who dedicate their
time and energy to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Dr. Chi Yhun Lo, who is a research associate
in the SMART Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada.
You can find the resources mentioned by Chi Yhun Lo during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Welcome, Chi.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Thank you for making space in the very busy schedule that you have right now.
Okay.
I read all the research that you're doing, and it's amazing.
Thank you.
I am interested in first exploring before the researcher where all that came from.
Who are you? What is your background?
Things like that.
When did the little spark start?
Yeah, I guess it really starts from childhood
for me, where I think maybe in
a lot of Asian households, the children are often encouraged to learn music.
I have two other siblings.
I learned piano, my brother learned cello, and my sister learned violin.
We had a nice little trio.
And I think that, to me, was the starting point for music engagement.
But I suppose the thing was that I actually
don't think I enjoyed music a lot as a child.
I think it was all very... It was a little bit forced,
and it was a little bit like rote learning.
I didn't really have a real appreciation for it until a little bit later in life,
when - I think when I was a teenager,
and I think I really got into playing guitar,
really got into the Beatles, and I was like, Ah, this is music to me.
I understand it now.
Music became something really incredibly fulfilling.
I think it really formed a massive part of my social identity.
Ever since then, I think I haven't really looked back
in terms of musical engagement.
I subsequently became an audio engineer when I left school,
and I used to do a lot of...
I did a lot of live shows,
and I had two streams of types of shows.
I would be doing either really big festival-type shows during
the summer season in Sydney.
There would be massive acts.
It could be, for example, I did some work with Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys,
Silver Apples, Nick Cave, Missy Higgins, some big Australian artists.
But my main gig as well, I was a touring front-of-house audio engineer,
and I used to do a lot of work for a children's band.
It wasn't the Wiggles, it was the Hooli Doolies, the poor man's version
of the Wiggles in Australia.
And that, to me was a really fascinating period of my life, I suppose,
where on one hand, I'm working with adults, and you can see see
the importance of engagement with music.
It's such a critical part, I think, of humanity.
But at the same time, when you see the kids interacting,
you can quite clearly see it.
It's like, Wow, these are kids who have not really been trained in music.
These are kids who are two, three, four years old,
and they're engaging with music. They're dancing.
There's something incredibly intuitive and almost instinctual
when it comes to engagement with music.
Then subsequently, I think...
I think being an audio engineer or a roadie is a tough life.
You have to move so much audio equipment, and
you're the first one there, and you're the last one out.
And I remember driving the truck back to the workshop at 4:00 AM, and I was thinking,
I can't keep doing this.
I think I need to find something else.
So I decided to go to university, and I completed a bachelor degree
in speech and hearing science.
I don't know how it is here in Canada, but in Australia, you got a really thick
book with all of the courses and all of the universities,
and it's actually incredibly challenging to find out what it is you want to do.
But I saw, oh, hearing, and I thought, oh, that's something
that I'm deeply passionate about.
So I jumped into that degree and I was very,
very fortunate to get involved
in an undergraduate internship program
with Harvey Dillon at the National Acoustic Laboratories in Sydney.
And Harvey at the time was the head of the National Acoustic Lab, which is
the Australian Government Research Wing that does anything to do with
hearing and deafness science.
And I got involved in a project that was looking at spatial processing disorder,
which is this condition where
children have a lot of trouble focusing
their sound by integrating their ears.
And where this becomes really important is in the context of listening in
a classroom, for example, where maybe you are with your class and they're all
behind you and your teacher is in front.
If you have spatial processing disorder, it it was very difficult
to maybe separate the sound sources.
The teacher is here and the classmates are here, but in your mind,
everything is just condensed.
So it was a project looking at that.
And they developed a auditory training program.
And my mind was blown because I was like, Auditory training?
This is a thing?
I had absolutely no conception of this.
And so I got involved in a PhD project
where I really utilized all of my experiences.
I looked at my experience with music and audio engineering and all of that,
and then this idea of auditory training.
So my PhD started to explore the benefits of music for
deaf and hard-of-hearing children.
So that's, I guess, the short journey of how I've come through to that.
So I'm currently a Senior Research Associate at the SMARTLab
at Toronto Metropolitan University.
I'm also affiliated with Macquarie University,
where I'll be taking up a new postdoctoral position in the new year investigating
neurodivergent auditory processing.
I also have an honorary appointment with the Australian Institute
of Health Innovation.
And finally, the last hat that I'm going to put on is I do work
with the Parents of deaf Children.
So I'm currently the Secretary, but in the past, I've been the Vice President.
And the Parents of Deaf Children are a nonprofit charity organization
that supports deaf and hard-of-hearing families.
It's really about providing families with as much unbiased and
really informed information so that they can articulate and make
the best decisions for their family.
I guess that's
my basic introduction in a nutshell.
Can you give us a little bit of details on, for example, I know you did a lot
of work about cochlear implants.
You did research, you did processing, and back in Australia, but also
what you're doing right now in the lab.
Yes.
Can you explain what you're doing exactly?
Definitely.
It was a very rich experience in Australia because
I was based in the Australian Hearing Hub at Macquarie University,
and literally next door, about 50 meters away from us, was Cochlear headquarters.
It was an excellent opportunity to really do some collaboration
with Cochlear Limited over there.
I have done some consulting with them
on some of their music applications, for example.
So a lot of my work coming out of my PhD
and continuing since then was really
looking at music and deafness.
And I think when I talk about music and deafness, I guess the first thing
that comes to our mind is, okay, in this contemporary context,
it's music and hearing aids, music and cochlear implants.
And a lot of people are often like, oh, it must be such a new
topic, such a new experience.
But I think what's really fascinating is, and I'm just going to pull up a slide
on here because I want to read this section, because it actually comes
from the American Annals of the Deaf
And there was an article from 1848.
Okay, so this is 250 years ago.
This is predating, essentially, the fields of the professionization of audiology
and psychology, almost.
And the article was "Music Among the Deaf"
by W. W. Turner.
And in this, and I just want to read this quote here, he writes this here,
"We have often been asked the question by visitors: have the deaf any idea of sound?
We have answered: they have no more idea of sound than the blind have of colours,
as the idea of sound can be imparted to the mind
only through the sense of hearing.
Those who are totally deaf must therefore be wholly destitute of any such idea."
These are very, very powerful words.
And again, this is coming from the context of 1848.
"They may know much about sound, may know how it is propagated.
Its law of transmission may be familiar to them, and still, they may and must be
entirely ignorant of its nature.
Another question is sometimes asked, whether the deaf can be taught music.
This question, like the first, we have answered in the negative,
presuming that hearing is indispensable to its acquisition."
But this is the important part right at the end here.
"A little reflection might have led us to a different conclusion."
And fortunately, W. W. Turner
did spend a lot of time reflecting.
He was very lucky because he met a young woman who was profoundly deaf.
Her name was August Avery, and she had been trained how to play piano.
And he was absolutely gobsback.
He couldn't believe it at first.
But when he realized to some extent, how wrong his initial conceptualisation of
what music and deafness, that interaction meant, he really turned his idea around.
He subsequently became a real champion for deafness and music.
And so for me, I think historically, and even to this day,
there's a real prioritization that
music engagement is all about hearing.
And to some extent, this is quite incompatible to, I think, the
general idea of what deafness entails.
But for me, there's a lot of things to unpack.
Number one, the construction of deafness is across a whole range.
We have a whole range of using
the medical model of deaf diagnosis,
from mild to complete deafness.
There are also assistive listening devices that we can use,
hearing aids and cochlear implants.
There's also the use of sign language or other alternative or augmented
communication methods as well.
And I want to bring all of these in because when I think about music,
again, it's not just about hearing and that auditory thing.
So if I use the example of, let's say, Let's have a violin player, for example.
Now we've got our violin player, and maybe we set them up and they've got
their score in front of them.
And so we've got the action of playing. We've got motor control here.
So we've got this motor system being engaged.
We've got the use of the visual system because we're looking at the score.
We also clearly have the auditory system, and it's a bit of a feedback loop
because we're trying to play something and we want to hear it,
and we might make adjustments if we're not playing the right key.
But now let's say maybe we remove the sheet music.
Now we're leveraging executive functioning and working memory.
Maybe we ask the violinist, please compose us some music.
So again, we're leveraging all of this cognition and creativity.
Maybe we turn it into an ensemble, and now we've got this group
and social dynamic happening.
So really, the function of music, yes, audition is a part of it,
but it's massive in scope.
And I think when we think about it in this multisensory perspective,
that's a much better way of looking at how music can be universally applied irrespective
of what capacities you might have.
And then we can also think about how we can generate benefits
through this conceptualization of music.
So my work with cochlear implants
and hearing aids and deafness in general,
it really stems from some of my interactions that I had with
family members to begin with, where a lot of them would tell me that,
number one, in the Australian context, a lot of deaf and hard-of-hearing
kids are mainstream-educated.
I'm not entirely sure how the context plays out in Canada, but I
assume that it's probably similar.
These days, we have newborn hearing screening, early intervention.
So a lot of these children are having very good access to auditory cues,
and subsequently, quite sadly, to some extent, a lot of specialized deaf schools
have been reducing in their numbers.
I think there are pros and cons.
But a lot of the families would often tell me that
when it came to something like music engagement,
maybe they have a choir, for example, in the school, or they have a little
ensemble, or maybe they're all just playing recorder, like a lot of kids.
A lot of parents would often express that
the teachers and the staff really
didn't think that these deaf and hard-of-hearing kids would be
suitable to join these classes.
There's a lot of exclusion here.
For me, coming from this perspective of music fundamentally has been
so important for my development, and I think it has a real place
to play in really everyone's development.
For me, that was just this plan discriminatory.
And so for me, as a researcher and as an advocate as well, having these two
hats, I was like, well, what can I do?
And so I was like, well, I really want to explore what are the benefits
of music participation for deaf and hard-of-hearing kids.
So my PhD explored a 12-week music program,
and this was primarily music therapy
supplemented or complemented by
this app that we had. And on the app,
it was a range of musical activities.
And after this 12-week period, we were interested in a couple
of different outcomes.
Number one, the biggest challenge for most deaf and hard-of-hearing
kids comes with listening in noisy and complex environments.
And that's really where, I would argue, that's where a lot
of social activity happens.
If you think about any social engagement we have, whether it's a restaurant,
a pub, a club, even libraries are quite noisy these days, a lot of them.
These are places where we have these powerful social interactions.
And when we think about it in the context of children, it's happening
in the classroom where, again, they engage in a lot of auditory tasks
and children are inherently noisy.
So really the educational outcomes, that's a big part.
But another consideration is what happens in outside
the classroom and in the playground.
Again, a very noisy place, but that is really where all
of that social facilitation happens.
And for children, once they've reached the of about five, six onwards, they start
moving away from these dyadic or these one-on-one conversations, and they start
moving towards group conversations.
So it's really important that we really maximize the opportunity to communicate
in these complex and noisy environments where they're going to be learning either
their education or they're going to be learning how to socialize and
develop a peer support network.
And the really nice finding from the PhD was after 12 weeks
of music, there were dual benefits.
There was a benefit for speech and noise perception,
so we found communication benefits.
But on the other side of things, we also found psychosocial benefits, too.
So things such as what we classify as these internalized problems,
things like low mood or depression, these were also boosted by by music engagement.
So for me, it was a really sad hearing what had been happening historically
where teachers or the school system might be thinking, these deaf
and hard-of-hearing kids, they can't participate in music.
When in fact, my findings were, there were some really specific benefits here
that are specifically beneficial for deaf and hard-of-hearing kids.
So to deny them this is absolutely terrible.
So I've been using a lot of that to try and articulate the accessibility of music
for deaf and hard-of-hearing kids.
Now, there's this broader political perspective happening in Australia
at the moment, where I'm not sure if you're familiar with the National
Disability Insurance Agency, the NDIA, or the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
So this is a massive political undertaking that happened about 10 years ago.
And the Australian federal government provides a significant amount of financial
support for a range of disabilities.
Essentially, if you have a disability, you can sign up for this program.
And depending on what your functional needs are, they provide you
with full monetary funding support.
For example, if you are a deaf and hard-of-hearing child, you might require
audiological service, you might require speech pathology service, you might
require sign language, interpretation services, so on, the whole range.
But it extends a little bit further than maybe these typical medical perspectives.
You can also access things like music therapy or art therapy
or creative therapy until recently, where they're starting
to tighten up on their funding model.
And sadly, I think the same thing that happens in education whenever
the money is getting a little bit thin, the first thing they always remove
is the creative art and music therapy.
This is something that's been happening recently where they're in discussion
about removing music therapy as one of their key services that the Australian
government will fund and provide.
Again, to me, this just goes in the face of everything that I and others
have researched, where we found these specific benefits, and to remove that
goes against the empirical evidence.
It's something I really want to push back against because I think
it's going to set us back considerably.
That is one of the sad things that's currently happening
in the Australian landscape.
With your research, are you able to try to prove that it's going
the wrong way and maybe try to have a communication with these services?
Exactly. That's exactly what we've done.
We have already been partnering with the Australian Music Therapy Association.
They are the peak body that represents music therapy in Australia.
They are the ones who are most effective at the moment.
We have been writing as many letters of support as we can.
And a lot of other...
Even like the field of audiology, there are a lot of people in there who have
been able to amplify our voice as well.
So we have already had discussions with some of the key politicians
So hopefully, come the new year, they're going to have a bit of a rethink,
because I would love to see music and creative and art therapy still
maintained within the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
And this is your...
I wouldn't say the study cases because
it's not human enough, but
the people you work with, it's mostly children, or did you work also with adults?
I've also worked with adults.
That was really the start of my PhD, but I've since expanded.
A lot of the work now actually continues through my current PhD student.
So I want to have a shout out to my
absolutely wonderful PhD candidate, Felicity Bleckly.
She's a bilateral cochlear implant user, and her PhD is really
focused on some much more complex ideas now now around music and deafness.
Her PhD is really focused on, number one, a specific type of deafness.
Whereas I was looking at things such as congenital or prelingual deafness
in the context of children, she's focusing exclusively on postlingual
or almost like age-related hearing losses, where we do know as a typical function,
our hearing does decline with age.
But her real interest, I guess it comes from her own personal
experience, where she has always had a profound connection with music
as a musician, like so many musicians do.
And she subsequently lost her hearing later in life
and now uses two cochlear implants.
And she initially found the experience in terms of that auditory perception
and that level of engagement It just wasn't sufficient.
And it's impossible for us to expect any device, such as the cochlear implant,
to replace our hearing ability.
It's a completely different way of interpreting sound.
We have close to, I think, maybe 20,000 hair cells that do
a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to auditory perception.
And when we look at the cochlear implant, we are down to 20,
20 electrodes maybe trying to do the job of 20,000 hair cells.
So we lose a lot of the acuity.
But that area has been investigated quite a lot.
We do know that auditorially, a cochlear implant is nowhere near a human ear.
But the area that Felicity is really interested in is a lot more nuanced,
a lot more psychological, where it's like, okay, well, what is the consequence?
How do people engage with music when they have a postlingual deafness?
And how does their relationship with music change?
For example, she often talks about how there is such a massive grieving process
for her because on one hand, she hasn't just lost some hearing capacity.
She's also lost that connection and that engagement with music to some extent.
A lot of our research trying to understand, well, how can we get
that level of engagement back?
How can we maybe reframe music to some extent?
It's really interesting as well where I think some of the methods that Felicity
is using as well It's not a very traditional
scientific study, where maybe we have
a battery of questionnaires and we bring someone into the lab
and we're like, Can you tell us what this sounded like?
And look at the performance.
Very stereotypical standard psychological experiment.
In this case, Felicity is asking for a whole battery
of very interesting things, where we ask individuals to send us
little snippets of music that might have some very personal
significance, some meaning, or we ask them to send in some imagery
that also has meaning.
And we start doing analysis of this
or a little biographical written two-page
piece about their experience as well.
We're triangulating all of this data to have a more holistic perspective
of what music might mean.
I think what's really interesting is how for a lot of these individuals,
there is this initial grieving period, where there's a massive period of loss,
where for a lot of them, and I think I'd be the same as well,
music has always been there for me.
It doesn't matter in what emotional state.
I mean, if I'm happy, if I'm sad, if I'm high, if I'm low, if I need
a boost, or if I need something to calm me down, music is always there.
But you imagine when you lose that sense that connects you primarily,
or the sense that you have always associated through hearing with music,
and you lose that, and you are also grappling with your new sense of sound.
And now your one source of comfort music is also diminished, it's also gone.
So it's almost like a double problem.
So that's what we are currently exploring.
Because a lot of the hearing aid manufacturers, a lot of the
cochlear implant manufacturers, a lot of the engineers, the focus is primarily
on speech perception and communication.
And for us, it's all like, okay, that's all well and good.
But have you also also just considered music is going to be really
important, not just for musicians, but really a lot of people.
So we really want to look at ways in which we can prove the acuity
of these devices on one hand.
But we also just want to understand, Okay, what's really happening
and how can we maybe develop programs in the future that might be able
to articulate this a little better, or maybe even just communicate this
with audiologists so that they to be fundamentally aware of what the needs are.
In France, there is a specific brand called Audika.
This brand developed a few years ago a special program.
I think their first study cases were with Radio France, so the French National Radio.
Then they extended it to anybody.
It's based on hearing aids
or hearing improvements for musicians.
They created a full lab with a lot of ways to measure.
You have to come with your instrument or to sing if you're a singer.
Then they test and they follow the progression.
They have developed a special kind of earring aids
where it's way more improved
than any other earring aids.
You have way more settings, you have way more channels,
and you're rechecked very frequently, and I followed their study and it's very interesting.
I wonder if you had that experience to test with instruments
directly with the participants?
Yes.
Well, in Felicity's study, that's not the focus, but that was the focus
of some of my work previously and some of my other work as well.
We are very interested in, I guess, looking at different types
of perceptual judgments.
One of the tasks that we do look at in the pediatric study was
how they can identify different instruments.
It's also really interesting, I suppose, because a lot of parents
often ask me at the end of the study, Oh, okay.
My child really enjoyed participating in music, and we want to continue.
What instrument can you recommend?
That's probably the most common question I've always been asked,
what instrument can I recommend?
And for me, there's a couple of ways to answer this.
So perceptually, pitch is going to be more challenging than rhythm.
So you could argue that going for percussive instruments
is an easier choice if maybe you're looking at
getting them into music's beginning.
But I don't necessarily think that's the best approach because
there are other different types of instruments where even though their pitch perception
might not be as good as a typical hearing child, for me, that just doesn't matter.
I think it's the same concept in, I am not going to have as good pitch perception
as a professional musician.
It doesn't mean that I'm not going to just try playing piano anyway.
Piano also has the advantage where you can see all of the keys distinctly, and
they're labeled and organized in a very sensible way from low to high in pitch.
It's similar in a guitar or a stringed instrument, but there's a little bit more
complexity as well because you have those multiple strings happening.
But my answer for parents was always really quite simple.
I was like, there is no such thing as a best instrument for any given child.
It's just, what's the best instrument for your child is provide
a whole suite, a whole array.
Don't go and buy the the instrument outright, just hire it or hopefully
your school has a range.
See what they engage with because whatever they're going
to engage with and continue with, that's the best instrument for them.
For me, irrespective of whatever we have in our research findings, that to me
is the perspective I will always take.
Yeah.
Did you hear of this study in Melbourne, by the way, speaking of Australia,
with the Melbourne University, and they're paired with the Conservatory,
and they're also paired with someone who's an organologist.
So someone who study the instruments themselves, and they have improved,
or at least they constantly improve the use of instruments
for musicians with disabilities.
I don't know if they did a study about hearing.
That's a question I have.
Yeah, I'm not so familiar with that.
Historically, there was some really interesting stuff
coming out of Melbourne.
They were doing, for example, they got a...
They wanted to develop some concerts
for cochlear implant users, for example.
They did a lot of work with audiologists and individuals with lived experience,
and then pairing them with composers,
and basically looking at how there is
going to be a difference in hearing.
So you want to tailor the sound for someone with a cochlear implant.
And a lot of work has been done on that actually, where cognitive implant users
have a preference for the vocal track.
They want the vocal track to be maybe three decibels louder, just a little bit
louder than a mainstream mix, just to be able to hear the vocals and the lyrics
and the melody just a little bit more.
So these are some interesting things that are being done.
There's also a deaf musician advocate
in Australia called Asphyxia.
They developed a program called Amplio, where it's looking at how
some of the song composition and the song mix
can be adjusted for a deaf and hard-of-hearing population.
I think there's a lot of interesting work being done in this space.
I have a question for you as a musician.
All this research, how did it affect your perception of music as a musician?
I think it made me realize the multisensory nature, number one.
I think before becoming a researcher, I think I also had that bias where it's like,
Oh, it's It's all about my ear, it's all about the hearing.
But when I really took a lot of time to reflect on it, it's like, no,
there's so much more to it.
I think that perspective, it just broadens the possibility
of what music can be and what music can mean.
So to me, it's just expanded my scope of, I guess, musical engagement
and musical practice.
On the other hand, because I'm so busy as a researcher now,
I've lost my calluses on my fingers.
I actually don't have enough time to play.
I do a lot more research and a lot more listening to music
than I do getting to play music.
But to be fair, I guess, I think there are - I would probably
prefer listening to other musicians than listen to myself anyway.
I'm comfortable with that.
I think we all have our specialties, and I'm a better researcher
than I am a musician.
What does it mean for you to work in that research environment where
you promote disability culture and you work about accessibility in the arts?
What does it mean for you?
For me, it's something that,
number one, I'm deeply passionate about.
That's my selfish perspective. I'm doing this because I love it.
You know...
But I also want my passion
and my research interest to be reflected
and to have application.
That, to me is also fundamentally important.
I'm not a theoretical researcher.
What I do has to be empirically grounded, and it has to have
fundamentally benefit for the community.
So that's why it's really important that I do a lot of engagement work
with, for example, the parents of deaf children.
I like to give a lot of talks at conferences or workshops
where it is really important that I present this work.
I want to see music and deafness taken really seriously
and for it to be accessible.
And for it to be accessible throughout the world
and from the start through the finish, from kids all the way to older adults.
I think there are benefits throughout all.
And a lot of my research really spans that as well.
So I've spoken a little bit about the pediatric work, a little bit of work
from my PhD candidate, and also some of
the work that I'm doing going forward
is really centred around now choir singing.
So some of my most recent work,
we are looking at projects with SingWell.
The SingWell Project is housed at Toronto Metropolitan University
and is co-directed by Professor Frank Russo and Dr. Arla Good.
And it's really about generating and examining the benefits
of group singing for populations which have some communication disorder.
This can be anything from aphasia, Alzheimer's,
and in my case, hearing loss.
So I'm leading a multi-site study where we are going to examine 12 weeks
of choir singing in older adults.
And specifically, these now are older adults with what we
classify as unaddressed hearing loss.
So these are older adults who typically through aging,
their hearing drops off a little bit.
And the sensible thing to do for most of these individuals would be
see an audiologist and consider whether or not they're going
to get benefit from a hearing aid, because in most cases they will.
But there is a lot of stigma attached to assistive listening devices.
And in about 70 % of the cases where they would likely benefit from a hearing aid,
these adults actually just don't a hearing aid, or they might have a hearing
aid and it's just in the bedside table.
Very, very, very common.
And the stigma is incredibly powerful.
But it's really interesting because when I've spoken to
some of my audiologist colleagues.
This is the anecdote I always like to use, where this older gentleman turns up.
He's got spectacles, he's got white hair, he's got a walking stick,
he's got a bit of a hunch, and comes into the audiologist
appointment, and subsequently told that he would benefit from a hearing aid.
But he refuses because he doesn't want to look old.
You know... (Laughs.)
And that is often a rationale that's used.
And it's like, okay, that's an interesting perspective,
given everything else that we can see.
But that's how strong this stigma is.
It is often attached with a lot of these ageist, ableist perspectives.
So really for us, actually, one of the most interesting things is, well,
on one hand, I've already found that music training seems to benefit children
who are deaf and hard of hearing.
Now we want to know, can it apply to an older population?
And we are trying to target now, specifically the group that is,
I suppose, the largest cohort of people who are deaf and hard of hearing
are those who actually just don't do anything about their hearing loss.
That's our current research direction.
Very interesting.
For me, it's really fascinating how
a community of musicians or singers or
the community leads to something different.
If you take the person, him or herself, and you talk about the benefits
of having a hearing aid or maybe how it will impact the musicianship
or how it will impact the way they will feel in the society and hear better.
It's like, Yeah, but I will feel old if I wear it.
Then if you bring all these people together in a choir and you do
an experiment and they all wear hearing aids, and it doesn't matter anymore
because they see that, Okay, if this guy is doing it, maybe
he looks older than me, I'm going to do it too.
Yes.
Actually I think...
The examination of stigma is
another facet of the research that I do.
And one of the things that I set up in Australia
was a science workshop specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing children.
It was exactly this problem where because these children are mainstream-educating,
they are often the only deaf and hard-of-hearing child, maybe
in their class, maybe in their whole cohort, maybe in the whole school.
And when they come to these workshops, which are
designed specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing kids,
a lot of the children have often come up to me,
and they've just looked at me, it's like, This is just so cool.
I've just actually never met another deaf kid.
And they often write.
They write to us and they'll be like, Oh, it's so cool that everyone here
just gets it about deafness.
So I don't have to just constantly explain to my teacher.
Like, okay, these are my hearing aids,
and I'm going to connect my radio frequency device.
I'm going to put something on a little lanyard on you so that I can hear you.
Please make sure that you switch it off when you go to the washroom. (Laughs.)
All of these little things that
it can easily slip your mind.
But we provide...
We have assistive listening devices.
We have deaf awareness training for all of our educators.
Everything is captioned.
Everything is provided also in...
We have written handouts for all of the experiments.
And then we also remove any science experiment
that's going to be maybe very loud or very reliant on hearing, for example.
There are lots of ways in which we can engage, as you say, with the community,
and fundamentally, bringing these kids together, normalizing their deafness and
for them to meet a peer support group.
When will that happen, this SingWell 12 weeks?
The SingWell will be kicking off at the end of winter,
so the start of spring next year.
It's a big multi-site project.
We have seven sites around the world.
We have partners in Canada,
in the USA, in Germany, in the UK,
in Australia and in the Netherlands.
We got lots of partners, and hopefully - we have our protocol paper published,
and we will hopefully have the full paper published in two years time, something like that.
It's fascinating.
It's a good segue to the last question, which is about people
who might have motivated you, helped you, who were important in your career.
In all this research you've done, you've probably met a lot of different people
who maybe, I don't like the term inspired you, but sometimes it's the case.
I was thinking, if you had one or two people or maybe more to name,
who would it be and why?
I have to give a shout out, firstly, to my PhD supervisors from five years ago.
Catherine McMahon, a real expert in the audiology world.
Valerie Looi, who is an expert also in cochlear implant listening
and also in music.
She herself is a music therapist, and she's done a lot of work looking at
this idea of music appreciation.
And I just wanted to touch on it a little bit because we've been talking
about hearing capacities and the ability to listen.
But the idea of music appreciation is that it doesn't necessarily matter
how accurate you are at perceiving music.
You can still enjoy and appreciate music irrespective of that.
And I think that's going to be very true.
I think musicians, for example, they might listen to an orchestra and they can
pick out all these maybe individual notes coming out of a single player.
But for other people, they're just going to listen to it maybe
a little bit more holistically.
And it doesn't really matter that you can tell what scale
they're playing or what notes they're playing, you can still enjoy it.
You can still appreciate it.
And I think that's a very useful model for us to use, particularly
when it comes to deaf and hard of hearing musical appreciation.
A shout out also to Bill Thompson, an emiratist professor who is one
of the leaders in music psychology.
They were all really instrumental in helping shape who I am now.
A little bit more recently,
I've been inspired by also my PhD candidate,
Felicity Bleckly, who's doing some really amazing work.
And I think it really highlights the power of having that lived experience
when it comes to leading these projects.
There are certain ways of how she's tackling the project.
This is very different to how I would have done it.
And I think it's really important, number one, that I celebrate this perspective
And I'm so appreciative that I get to work and supervise Felicity as well.
I'm really excited to see her become a doctor in the next few years
and excited to see all of these outputs and how it can have
some impact in the next few years, too.
In Toronto, I was really fortunate enough to meet Rory McLeod,
who is, I believe, the founder maybe, or CEO of Xenia Concerts.
And it was really my first experience being able to appreciate or even just
experience, to begin with, these casual, relaxed listening experiences.
It was just so different to me because I've always been someone
who's always gone to gigs, whether it's a big orchestra piece in a fancy opera
to maybe me just playing some rock and roll music in a dingy pub.
I've always appreciated all of these.
But I think what's really interesting is that culturally,
we do have certain expectations of what a concert and what a gig is.
And culturally, these things are not...
They're transmitted very loosely, and we just somehow know how
an opera is going to operate, for example.
But I think this very formalization,
this formal approach or these expectations are also
just not in line with when we think about disability and neurodivergent.
It's just fundamentally not very compatible.
They are so structured for a normative person.
For me, music is just not normative to begin with.
Why are we trying to scaffold it into this theme?
Actually, I want to just have a brief segue into models.
I think we're all probably very familiar with the medical model,
which is very deficit-heavy.
And then I think a lot more research is moving towards the biopsychosocial
model, where we have a much more holistic perspective of these things, where
there is nothing really inherently wrong with any individual.
It's really based on what's happening in maybe the broader community
and how we structure these things.
Another model that one of the research groups that I've been working with
complements this, and we call it the possibility model, or rather we're
borrowing this idea of possibility model.
And we're borrowing it from feminist theory and from
queer gender theory as well.
And I just wanted to bring this in because I think it's a nice little segue.
And it really comes out from... Strangely enough, it was just like
a Hollywood interview
with a transgender actor, Laverne Cox, who is one of
the stars from Orange is the New Black.
And she was asked in an interview, She's like, Oh, how do you
feel about being this transgender actor role model now that you've made it big?
And this was her response here.
"I would never be so arrogant to think that someone should model their life after me.
But the idea of possibility, the idea that I get to live my dreams out in public,
hopefully will show to other folks that it's possible.
So I prefer the term possibility model to role model."
And I've really taken this on in a lot of the research that I do now.
And one of the other research projects that I'm a part of
is broadly called deafnesses, so a pluralization of deafness.
And here, again, we're trying to have a more spectral
spectrum approach to deafness.
And by that, we actually think this has significant implications when
it comes to the treatment of deafness.
So the standard model of care, for example, if you are identified as having
a prelingal deafness from newborn hearing screening, you're then either recommended
hearing aids or cochlear implants in the first instance to your family.
Our question is, why is that?
Why has that become the stereotypical role model approach?
That is the first thing that the clinician or even the general public mind goes to.
But to the detriment to things such as augmented communication
or things like sign language.
And we know this, we have the stats to back this up.
Like Australian sign language, Auslan is is decreasing,
and cochlear implantation is increasing.
So there's a clear relationship here.
But we feel like it's a bit uncomfortable if that becomes your stereotypical
role model approach, where it's like, okay, if you have a deafness,
you become a cochlear implant user.
For us, it's a little bit more sensible. Why don't we consider the breadth?
And maybe we can have a bi-modal approach where you can also have
a cochlear implant, but you can also have sign language, too.
We don't want to really force anyone down this specific part.
And so, again, this idea of possibility model, I think, really
has imparted itself upon me in almost every way that I think about life
and think about research.
So again, coming back to Xenia, I think, again, it's this idea of
really embracing the possibility model.
When you go to a gig, there's not necessarily just one way
in which you can appreciate it.
And taking this spectral approach, we need to be not just accommodating
of everyone, but really just...
It's that full acceptance and full wanting
to have maximum flourishing, almost.
We want to really maximize the opportunity and the engagement.
And I really love that Xenia concert model, where we are, to some extent,
deconstructing what it means to have a concert.
And I love that.
As someone who really enjoys the work of John Cage, where you can really
go outside the bounds of what music should be, I'm all for that.
And the very last person I want to have a quick shout out to is Ben Brown,
who is a deaf percussionist, and I was fortunate to meet him
in Ottawa maybe two years ago.
And he was running a workshop, almost...
It was almost this philosophical way of listening.
And I just really appreciated his approach.
You can imagine, I've been engaged in listening, and I'm a musician,
someone who studies music psychology, someone who is really
fundamentally engaged with this.
And yet some of the things he was talking about was really new
and really quite mind-blowing, mind-expanding.
And I appreciated how he was able to introduce me, I suppose,
to new ways of listening.
And That, to me, again, is really falling within everything that I said so far,
this idea of this possibility model, these new ways of interpreting sound,
pairing that with vision, pairing that with tactile touch.
I think, again, coming back to this idea of music as multisensory, hopefully,
I've done a sufficient job in tying it all together right at the end.
Well, thank you so much.
Good luck with everything that is happening right now
in present and future, you have lots of work that is coming on that.
Lots of writing, too, because all that is going to become great articles for sure.
Thank you so much.
I'm sure we're going to cross path again in some projects.
I will have to find a way so that you can come visit me in Australia.
There's lots of projects I want to do and lots of people I want to partner with,
so we'll try and make some things happen.
Thank you so much.
Have a fantastic day and talk soon.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me, Diane.
Thank you. Bye.
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