[LAU] Music for the deaf

[Simon Fielding]

On Tue, 2010-01-19 at 14:52 +0100, Lorenzo wrote:
> 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?

The final CD will definitely be only her voice. She is perfectly capable
of recording unaccompanied but we may well play a simple MIDI piano
version of the melody into her phones to ensure accuracy of pitch.

> 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?)
> 
I'm trying to obtain a copy of :-

Darrow, A. A. (1990). The effect of frequency adjustment on the vocal
reproduction accuracy of hearing impaired children. Journal of Music
Therapy, 27, 24-33.

to see if it will help but the implication of the summaries I've seen
seems to lead us down the route of individually mastered CD's for each
child. That is a little beyond my abilities, the scope of the project
and the available information.

The repertoire will be nursery rhymes and childrens songs - I think
fairly uniform dynamics will be a useful thing to aim for.

> 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.

The end-user equipment is not likely to be of a high standard in many
cases and your point is a good one. There is unlikely to be much in the
way of EQ on the children's playback equipment - this is another reason
for trying to find out what would be appropriate at the
recording/mastering stage.

> It seems very interesting. Keep us updated :)
> 
I'll be happy to although timescales depend on us both being in the same
county at the same time and haven't been arranged yet.

> Kind regards,
> Lorenzo

Regards,
Simon