Acoustics is the study of a physical property, sound, but the point of your work is that it's intensely psychological as well, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, my colleagues and I sort of do all sorts of kind of things like designing alert sounds for scooters or looking at how we might make a drone sound not so annoying and all this.

And all these features, when we come to engineer a machine or engineer a place, a building or environment, it's humans who judge is this a success or not.

So if you look at quite a lot of our research, it looks like experimental psychology because in the end, who's judging whether this design works or this change to a place works, is a human.

And it gets really complicated because it varies hugely between people.

We have this doctoral centre in all diversity, which is acknowledging the fact that we all hear differently.

There's a tendency in design to think we've got a standard listener and that's who we're working with, but we all hear very differently.

And significantly, a booba is a rounded shape and a kiki is a sharp shape.

Do we have hearing aids on the market at the moment that, that can do this sort of thing too?

So yeah, I mean, the, the most common treatment for age-related hearing loss is hearing aids, and unfortunately, they are mostly designed for speech, uh, from a sort of music perspective.

I mean, their, their primary have always been the research is focused on how do we improve speech communication, has been the primary, most important task.

And then music is something that is dealt with as an add-on.

So you will get music programs, but there's not anywhere near as much research being done on those as there is on, on speech communication.

And the, how well these work is kind of quite mixed.

So if you look at the sort of work like the Hearing Aids for Music project, you'll see that, yeah, some people find the music program works really well for them, and others find actually it's better to turn it off and listen without their hearing aid.

So what are some of the sort of headline findings that you've discovered so far? You know, what are, what are some of the successes?