[LAU] Music for the deaf

[Lorenzo]

Hi Simon,

> My sister is a specialist teacher for hearing-impaired primary school
> children. As part of her curriculum she includes music and in
> particular, nursery rhymes etc for the younger children. She would like
> them to be able to sing these at home with and/or for their parents. For
> those children with non-hearing-impaired parents, this is not a problem
> but many of the children also have hearing-impaired parents. Therefore
> she would like to produce a CD of her singing for the children to take
> home and use. I would really appreciate any help members can give me as
> I am not a professional musician or recording engineer.
>
> 1) She will be singing unaccompanied (she is a trained singer and is
> perfectly competent to do this) in an alto register to avoid any
> distraction for the children from accompaniments etc. Does anyone have
> any suggestions about this? (eg effects for recording, effects for the
> headphone mix etc)
>   
Do you mean the final CD will only have her voice on but she will be 
having an accompaniment during recording?
Or no accompaniment at all at any stage?
> 2) This one's a bit more specialist so you may not be able to help -
> hearing impairment often starts with loss of high frequency response.
> The obvious thing would seem to be to boost these but I don't know if
> that would be correct. Does anyone know?
>   
Not sure about the effect/benefit in case of impairment. Anyhow 
frequency manipulation can be done using various types of equalizer. 
Some suggest 'pushing' 3Khz and around up a little to enhance voice 
clarity.. But it all much depends on the recording and performer's 
quality (in neutral sense) and also the repertoire.
Also some compression may come in handy in this case if you'd like to 
have a fairly uniform level (I am not sure if impairment would affect 
sensitivity to dynamics?)

One other, maybe trivial, but often overlooked suggestion especially for 
such a specific case is to test the final CD on the audience's 'expected 
listening equipment'. What I mean is that it may sound great on 
expensive studio gear but if the children and families are going to play 
it on cheap home stereo it may not sound as good, so testing the CD on 
these and in a non-so-good acoustical environment might be a good idea.
> Any comments on any other aspects of this project would also be more
> than welcome.
It seems very interesting. Keep us updated :)

Kind regards,
Lorenzo