Bringing together literature from music education, posthumanism, sound studies and ethnomusicology, this article considers what sound 'does' in music education spaces. Within posthumanism, the role of sound, as a manifestation of material-human entanglements, is under-theorised. This article, diffractively plays with the literature and evidence…

Purpose: Some bilinguals may exhibit lower performance when recognizing speech in noise (SiN) in their second language (L2) compared to monolinguals in their first language. Poorer performance has been found mostly for late bilinguals (L2 acquired after childhood) listening to sentences containing linguistic context and less so for…

Purpose: Autistic adults consistently report difficulties understanding speech in adverse listening environments, which may be related to differences in social communication and participation. Research examining masked-speech recognition in autistic adults is limited, particularly in competing speech backgrounds with high degrees of informational…

Background: Sustained vowels are important vocal tasks that have been investigated in discriminating voice disorders using acoustic analysis. To date, no study has combined vowel acoustic measures only that evaluate major aspects of the pathological voice signals in voice disorder discrimination. Aims: To investigate the value of vowel acoustic…

Humans implicitly pick up on probabilities of stimuli and events, yet it remains unclear how statistical learning builds expectations that affect perception. Across 29 experiments, we examine the influence of task-irrelevant distributions--defined across acoustic frequency--on both tone detection in noise and tone duration judgments. The shape and…

At the juncture where education meets technology and new media, Hip Hop can serve as one of the most transformative teaching tools. "'Stacks, Sounds and a Record a Day': An Introduction to DJ Rhetoric and Sonic Lineage in Praxis" harnesses this very energy: using personal narrative alongside scholarship in the field of rhetoric and…

Purpose: The significance of extended high-frequency (EHF) hearing (> 8 kHz) is not well understood so far. In this study, we aimed to understand the relationship between EHF hearing loss (EHFHL) and speech perception in noise (SPIN) and the associated physiological signatures using the speech-evoked frequency-following response (sFFR). Method:…

Noise is a common impedance to easy and accurate speech understanding. In the presence of noise, speech processing mechanisms proceed with partial or ambiguous inputs, and listeners will engage additional cognitive resources to make sense of what they hear. The extent to which this is situation is affected by diminished exposure to a language is…

This article considers the related concepts of 'rehearsal' [Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. "The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study." Brooklyn: Minor Compositions] and 'catastrophe' [Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. "In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism." Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Open…

Autistic adults are often perceived as having an atypical speech. The acoustic characteristics of these impressions prove surprisingly difficult to delineate, but one feature that does robustly emerge across different studies is higher pitch (F0 values) in autistic versus neurotypical individuals. However, there is no clear explanation why…

Purpose: This study considered the impact of spectral and temporal smearing on vowel and consonant discrimination in school-age children and adults with normal hearing (NH). The overall purpose of this work was to test the hypothesis that degraded spectral cues preferentially impact vowel discrimination, while reduced access to temporal cues…

Previous research has demonstrated early-emerging gender associations with musical instruments. We investigated whether pitch, loudness and size affect gender-instrument associations in older (M[subscript age] = 9.37 years, N = 57) and younger (M[subscript age] = 7.73 years, N = 63) children (approximately even gender split, mostly North…

Background: Digital cervical auscultation (CA) has been proposed since the 1950s for screening aspiration among patients with dysphagia. Researchers have investigated the 'external' effects such as bolus viscosity, volume, and head and neck positions. However, the influences of standardized liquid viscosity and food texture on swallowing sounds…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to quantify the combined effects of face masks and effortful speech styles on speech intensity, spectral moments, and measures of spectral balance in talkers with Parkinson's disease. Method: Fifteen people with Parkinson's disease and 15 healthy, older controls read aloud sentences in three face mask…

The objectives of this study were to describe, analyse and compare the sound environments to which deaf and typically hearing children between 3 and 18 months are typically exposed, and identify issues to support the development of guidelines for the use of radio aids in this age group. Thirty parents of children aged 3-18 months (14 deaf children…