The Hearing Aids for Music project – addressing musical needs in clinic

Dr Alinka Greasley Associate Professor of Music Psychology, University of Leeds & Dr Harriet Crook, Organisational Lead for Healthcare Science, Sheffield Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

The Hearing Aids for Music project (HAFM, 2015-2018, www.musicandhearingaids.org) explored how hearing impairments and the use of hearing aid technology affect music listening behaviour. Through a series of studies, including survey and interview studies with hearing aid users and audiologists, the project mapped the benefits and challenges of listening to music through hearing aids and strategies used to help improve musical experiences.

This webinar will provide an update on progress, key findings and publications, and focus on how we have adapted the findings into a series of resources for hearing aid users and practitioners. We will outline strategies that audiologists reported finding useful when addressing musical needs in clinic and how we have translated these into resources for clinical delivery (e.g. counselling tips, fitting hearing aids in clinic, tools to aid discussion). We will also report results of a small-scale impact study which asked audiologists to reflect on the usefulness of the resources.

Key Learning Objectives:

• To understand strategies that can be used in clinic to improve music listening for hearing aid users
• To reflect on your own clinical practice/experience and how this is similar to/differs from our resource guidance
• To be able to better support patients experiencing problems with music through awareness of empirical findings and developed resources

Take home messages: 

• Music plays a really important role in people’s lives – do ask about music in clinic where possible!
• We have developed evidence-based resources for patients and practitioners that are freely available
• There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach when fitting hearing aids for music, it’s important to take individual needs into account, and follow-up is recommended

Speaker biography

Dr Alinka Greasley is Associate Professor in Music Psychology in the School of Music, University of Leeds where she teaches music psychology at all levels, and leads the MA Applied Psychology of Music. Her expertise lies in social and applied music psychology in which she uses different theoretical approaches and research methodologies to explore people’s everyday musical behaviour. Recently, she has been focusing on how hearing impairments affect musical listening and performance. She is Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy; and a member of the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research.

Dr Harriet Crook is the Organisational Lead for Healthcare Science at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.  She has over 20 years’ experience in NHS audiology, in adult rehabilitation and cochlear implants. Dr Crook has had a wide range of research collaborations through funded projects with the Departments of Music, Computer Science and Human Communication Sciences at the University of Sheffield. More recently, she has been clinical lead for the University of Leeds AHRC funded ‘Hearing Aids for Music’ project and contributed to Sheffield Teaching Hospitals ‘In and out of Hospitals’ project, funded by The Arts Council, providing music workshops for those with hearing loss.