Studies related to hearing

The Voice You Know: Advantages of Familiarity

Western Interdisciplinary Research Building (WIRB)

It is a known phenomenon that familiar voices, that is, voices with which we have strong long-term familiarity with, are able to be more easily understood under challenging listening conditions. The goal of the present project is to investigate if familiar voices are easier to process than unfamiliar ones.

OMMABA: The Open Multimodal Music and Auditory Brain Archive

Western Interdisciplinary Research Building (WIRB)

We are searching for both musicians and non-musicians to participate in a behavioural and brain-imaging study about auditory abilities and the brain. This would help create a database focused on auditory cognition, allowing researchers to ask novel questions and understand in the links between neural responses and auditory perception of sound, music, and speech in health and disease.

Both male and female

18 years old to 35 years old

Healthy Volunteers

Effects of voice familiarity

Western Interdisciplinary Research Building (WIRB)

Is the voice of that special someone also special to your brain? Do we process familiar voices in a way that is different than the voices of strangers? We are looking for couples interested in helping us answer this question!

Both male and female

18 years old to 40 years old

Couples

Effects of brain stimulation on beat perception and motor performance

Western Interdisciplinary Research Building (WIRB)

Music is often associated with a desire to move. The goal of the study is to understand how different brain areas contribute to different aspects of rhythm perception in music and motor performance using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Both male and female

18 years old to 45 years old

Healthy Volunteers

Advanced hearing tests with amplification

Elborn College (EC)

Hearing tests typically include measuring the softest sound that can be detected in a soundproof booth. While this test is a good first indicator of someone's hearing, additional hearing skills may be needed to understand in real-world environments (such as an echoey room). Advanced hearing tests include the measurement of hearing the speed of changes in sound, the pitch of sound, gaps in sound, matching of sound between ears, the locations of sound, and the ability to process information from the two ears. We will correlate hearing aid outcome measures with these advanced hearing tests and will attempt to assess whether hearing aid benefit differs among groups of participants who vary in their hearing abilities. The results may help to explain variability in hearing aid outcomes across participants who have the same hearing test results on the current clinical hearing tests.

Both male and female

18+ years old

Volunteers with and without
hearing loss