Motivation and link to my practice
In this intervention, I’ll consider adding inclusive support for hearing in my teaching. At CCI I’m co-teaching the BSc Digital System unit in the Spring term, I introduced how sound is encoded in digital systems, and used a demo in Max MSP (a software widely used in audio programming education) that displays the audio waveform produced by a periodic sinusoidal signal (shown in the screenshot below). However, I found this part has been challenging for one of the students in my class who has a diminished hearing channel, because the class activity has involved listening to a piece of audio and inspecting the plotted audio waveform. Although I have been using auto-transcript in my lecture, mainly for my talk, it doesn’t work for the listening-and-inspecting activity because it fails to produce captions for the sound signal. Therefore, I hope to provide support for this activity to students who have a diminished hearing channel.
How feasible do you think it would be to implement?
I could make a glossary table, that provides descriptions of these common sounds, to help explain them to people with different hearing abilities. For instance, when I demonstrate a certain type of audio signal, I often say, “This is what sinusoidal sounds like”, and then I simply press play and let the student listen to the sound produced. However, this is not an accessible way of communication for students with diminished hearing channels. Therefore, in the glossary table, I’ll provide ways of describing these common sounds in audio programming using accessible and easy-to-understand language. Additionally, similar to the Color Blind Accessibility Manifesto (Monaco, 2022), which highlights some considerations for designing with visual colours, I could propose an accessibility manifesto for audio programming that calls for communicating characteristics of sound using non-auditory channels.
As a further step, I could also search for some existing software that performs auto-captioning, and evaluate how well they work on captioning common sounds used in audio programming education (such as the sound of a sinusoidal waveform, or the sound of periodically modulating a sound source).
Initial discussions
As a starting point, also in response to the suggestion from Tim in blog post 1, to first understand the needs of people with different or diminished sound processing. I’ll search for relevant existing works and literature on how hearing impairment has been studied or approached in the community of audio programming, in the pedagogy of music and audio. I’ll also keep an eye out for the auditory accessibility considerations in the public space, for instance, how conferences in the audio field or galleries and music venues, to understand what considerations and needs are involved, and connect them with my teaching experience at UAL.
References
Monaco, F. (2022) ‘Color blind accessibility manifesto’, Commun. ACM, 65(8), p. 7. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3543881.