A cocktail party is a nightmare for someone with hearing loss—not just because the voices are quiet, but because their brain can no longer tell where sounds are coming from. This matters because spatial hearing—the ability to locate a sound and separate it from background noise—is essential for making sense of busy, real-world environments. Normal-hearing listeners combine multiple cues: the tiny time delay between ears, the intensity difference caused by the head’s acoustic shadow, and even what they see. Hearing impairment degrades this ability, and hearing aids rarely restore it—they can even make things worse. Decades of research have not solved how the brain integrates these cues in complex, multi-sound situations, nor how impairment and aided listening disrupt that process. This programme is fundamental science. It will use cutting-edge auditory experiments to answer two questions: how the auditory system joins multiple location cues in dynamic, audio-visual settings, and how hearing loss and hearing aids alter that integration. If successful, the insights could inform future hearing aid design to improve spatial hearing—not just volume, but the ability to pick one voice out of a jumble. That would directly affect millions of people struggling in noisy everyday situations.
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A sharp sense of space is essential to making the world appear natural, real and joined-up. People with normal hearing can do exceptionally well in experimental tasks that measure the sense of space - someone's "spatial hearing". Yet hearing impairment generally worsens spatial hearing, leaving only an impoverished impression of auditory space. Hearing aids hardly ever help spatial hearing. Worse, they can often add further problems. But despite decades of research the science of spatial hearing is still not solved, especially for complex situations with multiple sounds happening simultaneously or in understanding the effects of impairment or aiding. This programme will help answer these puzzles. There are two overall benefits to listening from having acute spatial hearing. Both take advantage of that fact that in everyday listening sound sources are almost always in distinct physical locations. First, it allows sound sources to be perceived in the locations that they really are. Second, it allows sounds to be separated by virtue of being in different positions. These two together give a sense of realism to the auditory world and help identifying, recognizing or understanding sounds. These reduce the "clutter" of hearing in busy, noisy situations: without any spatial hearing at all, everything would be more likely to be heard together as a jumble. The situation is complicated by there being multiple cues to the direction and distance of a sound source. One is time: the sound from a source to the left will arrive a fraction of a second later at the right ear compared to the left as it has to travel some 50 cm further around the head. Another is intensity: the sound is less powerful as your head casts an acoustic "shadow". Yet despite these multiple cues we generally hear one location for a sound, not many. Further, what we see can affect where we hear a sound -- a famous example of this is the ventriloquist effect. The problem of generating accurate perceptions of auditory space is, overall, akin to solving a three-dimensional jigsaw of multiple overlapping sounds, time delays, and power differences. Somehow our perceptual systems seamlessly and apparently effortlessly solves the puzzle of putting all the pieces together properly. In this programme, we will use cutting-edge auditory experiments to answer two key questions. First, how does the auditory system join the multiple cues to location in complex, dynamic, multi-sound, audio-visual listening situations? Second, how does hearing impairment and aided listening affect this? We expect that the insights gained in this programme will help us to understand better how spatial hearing works in real, everyday listening, and will help inform how future hearing aids might be designed to improve spatial hearing
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