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.
I found the discussion around your intervention proposal really valuable in our Peer-to-Peer feedback session today. Once again, you’ve drawn my attention to an accessibility issue that I hadn’t consciously considered before, so I think your proposal to produce a manifesto will be valuable, as it will highlight different learning barriers for teaching staff, and provide a conversation starter for students about factors that impact their learning. Gathering (and conveying!) different experiences of sound will be an interesting challenge and I am looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
Your post reminded me of colleagues who are painters but are colour blind. This doesn’t prevent them from producing excellent work – in fact, it often leads to valuable conversations around perception and ways of seeing. That said, there are still specific challenges they face. For instance, matching or mixing particular colour tones can be difficult, and this leads them to lose confidence in mixing paint and talking about painting.
I wonder how we can better support students whose chosen area of study or practice involves sensory domains in which they experience limitations. It seems that adapting teaching practices to support these students is both necessary and quite complex. I imagine it’s quite challenging for a single person to adapt these methods alone, as doing so may require wider support in terms of resources, time, and institutional infrastructure.
Thank you for sharing your project proposal last Friday. The discussions we had about how we perceive and describe sounds and other sensory impressions was very interesting. Just as we perceive colours differently, we probably also experience sounds differently. You talked about the difficulty of verbally describing a sound – is there an agreed framework for this? Maybe something similar to how the taste of wine is described using a set of characteristics? If you are interested in looking into the wine tasting framework, a friend working in the wine industry recommended Behind the glass: The chemical and sensorial terroir of wine tasting by Gus Zhu (2024).
You proposed asking the students for their experiences and preferences – this is a great idea. Would it possible for them to communicate how they perceive a sound using non-verbal formats, for example images?
As a more practical and short-term solution, you could consider sharing the sound files before the session. A student with a hearing impairment might have access to specialist equipment enabling them to hear the recordings.
This is such a thoughtful and necessary intervention, it’s clear you’ve approached it with both care and technical insight. Your proposal to create a glossary of sound descriptors is particularly powerful, as it reframes audio as something that can be understood across multiple sensory channels. It also highlights a wider gap in the field: how often sound-based disciplines rely on listening alone. I also appreciated your reference to the Color Blind Accessibility Manifesto; drawing that parallel really helps ground the need for an audio equivalent. I’m curious to see how your manifesto evolves… this could have a real impact beyond your classroom, especially if adopted more broadly in audio education.