RCM Musician's Hearing
Audio3 Ltd. was approached by Dr. Aaron Williamon, the director of performance science at the Royal College of Music, to collaborate on a hearing health programme for their student and staff musicians. Together we developed a research programme to first investigate the hearing of these musicians as a special group. Over the last five years we have carefully measured over 300 musicians at the UCL Ear Institute, providing exhaustive audiometry, tympanometry, otoacoustic emission, and survey data for each one. The results have shown that musicians of different instruments may develop different audiometric hearing profiles.
In 2014 we expanded the project to develop a simple self-administered touchscreen audiometer. This device has now been in place at the RCM and is currently quietly gathering more research data. In the future we plan to add personal noise dosimetry to the project thereby add another data dimension.