Music Not Impossible

I recently stumbled upon this video about an awesome project: a tactile harness with various vibrating parts designed to experience music “physically”. Watch the video of the story here:

Although designed with the Deaf and hard of hearing in mind, I find this a really awesome idea for anyone. I think anyone who loves music might be interested into experience it on an even more intensive level. I would be very curious to try this out 🙂

My take on Hearables

Recently I was interviewed by Peggy Sylopp, head of the research project “Hear how you like to hear“. The project is about people’s view and need of hearables and Peggy gave me the opportunity to express my opinion here. I enjoyed the conversation very much, I hope you do too. Here’s the video (in German):

This was published as part of an article in the “Make” magazine and on heise.de:

https://www.heise.de/amp/hintergrund/liketohear-Ein-Raspi-Prototyp-fuer-individuelle-Hoergeraete-4687101.html?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR0pFYtKZGo6WOHOsqw7W54iujLWFlZ253_x39ysncq_sD3ijGcl8wM6sBI

Just use a headset already

In times of Covid-19, social distancing and home quarantine, many people resort to meeting their people via (video or telephone) conferencing. You call your coworkers when you work from home, after work you have a with call with Aunt Amy, and later in the event you join your nerd group of friends that you play the latest boardgame with.

I don’t have a clue about virology or any of the medical stuff, but if I could give you one piece of advice in these times: do your peers a favor and use a headset.

A person wearing a mickey-mouse style headset with a fixed microphone. The headset is connected to a laptop.

To some people, especially the gamers, this might be the obvious way to do conference calls, but I noticed that even for my tech savvy colleagues this isn’t all that obvious.

Continue reading Just use a headset already

Talk: Hear how you like to hear

A while ago, I mentioned the research project Hear how you like to hear. The researchers want to find out how users use hearables and what requirements they have for hearables. They have a very human-centered approach, which I like a lot, as it includes that hearing is very subjective and not everything about hearing can be captured in an audiogram.

The project is soon coming to an end. Peggy, the main researcher, gave a talk about the project and the results (the talk is in German, the slides are English). In particular, she found out that 90% of hearing aid users don’t find it important that the devices are small. That is pretty much the opposite of what the hearing aid industry is still selling. Great project, I hope there are more like this in the pipeline.

To teachers of students hard of hearing

I found this article a very good selection of advice for teacher of students who are hard of hearing: https://medium.com/voices-through-silence/how-misunderstandings-about-hearing-loss-are-hurting-our-deaf-and-hard-of-hearing-students-ad4b55711742

While my hearing got bad after I already finished high school, I can only imagine what burdens a hearing loss puts on students. I hope this article reaches a lot of teachers to be good allies for those affected.

Why 90% is Not Cool

I recently stumbled upon this talk by professional real-time captioner Mirabai Knight about why human captioning (still) matters:

I highly recommend watching the talk in its entirety. I found it super interesting and learned a lot. However, if you have only 5 minutes, I suggest watching starting at minute 10:38, which contains my personal highlight.

Continue reading Why 90% is Not Cool