Hearing Research at NTU

Hearing Research at NTU undertake research into the psychological, biological and computational basis of hearing, and hearing impairment.

Nine million people in the UK are classified as deaf or hard of hearing. The principal cause of this is damage to the delicate inner ear. Current hearing aids and cochlear implants partly restore our ability to hear. However, they perform poorly when aiding understanding of speech in more challenging circumstances. Understanding speech in noisy environments is a complex task for all of us, and its mechanisms are poorly understood; it involves interplay between the ears and multiple processing centres of the brain.

Our group studies how we perceive and process sound, and how this is affected by factors such as hearing impairment, cognition, age, cochlear implants, and other sensory information. By improving understanding of communication pathways between the ear and the brain, and the factors affecting these pathways, we aim to provide improved strategies for identifying risk factors that lead to reduced hearing and improve diagnosis and treatment strategies for hearing impairment and its related conditions.

The Hearing Research group works with the following institutions:

University of Nottingham

Kings College London

University of Cambridge

Purdue University, USA

Imperial College London

University of Manchester

University of Leicester

University of Southampton

Technical University of Denmark