Hearing & Sound
Why Following Conversations in Noisy Restaurants Can Be So Difficult
The clatter of a busy dining room is no accident of bad manners. It is physics, biology and a feedback loop that turns a pleasant supper into hard mental work.
Hearing & Sound
The science of how we hear, why the world sometimes gets muffled, and the technology helping us listen again.
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Hearing & Sound
How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Hearing Technology
Deep learning can now pull a voice out of a noisy room better than any filter before it. The hard part is making it fit behind an ear, run on a battery the size of a lentil, and answer in under ten milliseconds.
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Tech Analyst Reviews the UK's Most Popular Hearing Options, From Free NHS Devices to £3,000 Private Clinics - and Reveals What She'd Actually Recommend
From free NHS devices to £3,000 private clinics and £40 Amazon amplifiers: an audio-electronics analyst takes them apart.
Hearing & Sound
The Extraordinary Science of How Humans Hear
From the folds of the outer ear to a living amplifier coiled inside the skull, hearing is a chain of mechanical marvels that turns a ripple of air into meaning in a fraction of a second.
Hearing & Sound
How Modern Hearing Devices Separate Voices From Background Noise
From two tiny microphones a few millimetres apart to neural networks that take a fingerprint of the room, here is how a hearing aid decides which sounds deserve your attention, and how scientists check that it got it right.
Hearing & Sound
Why Some People Struggle to Understand Speech Even When They Can Hear Sounds
Being able to hear a voice but not make out the words is one of the commonest complaints in audiology. Science is finally explaining why the ears and the brain can disagree.
The Mind
Why the Brain Is So Good at Recognising Familiar Voices
A single word down a crackly phone line is often enough to tell you who is calling. Behind that everyday feat lies a dedicated network in the brain, and a surprising benefit for ageing ears.
Hearing & Sound
The Hidden World of Sound: Frequencies, Vibrations and the Human Ear
Elephants rumble below our hearing, bats shout above it, and blue whales have been singing steadily lower for sixty years. A tour of the sounds we cannot hear, and of the remarkable organ that hears the rest.