ABSTRACT
In audiology and environmental sciences, background sounds are very often seen as noise, a disturbing factor that needs to be suppressed. This point of view largely disregards the richness of background sounds, their importance for human functioning, and the fact that they can be used to improve well-being and quality of life. To actually deploy background sounds as a resource in real-life, we need to thoroughly understand the transition between sound and noise, which depends on the complex and dynamic interaction of acoustical features, exposure context, and listener’s characteristics. In this talk I will outline how findings from audiology, communication, cognition, neurology, acoustics, and environmental sciences should be brought together to fully understand the impact of background sounds on humans, which promising research techniques we have to couple qualitative to quantitative analyses, and how we could bridge the gap between laboratory research and real-life functioning.
BIOGRAPHY
Very recently in 2017 I have joined the École d’orthophonie et d’audiologie (Université de Montréal) as an assistant professor in audiology. Before I have been working at Ghent University (Belgium) on interdisciplinary research within the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences and the Acoustics Research group (Department of Information and Communication Technology). Here I have studied the effects of sound exposure on hearing and functioning, first during my PhD and later as a post-doctoral fellow.
My main research interest is how sound exposure affects in real-life auditory perception, health, functioning and well-being. I am currently co-supervising two PhD students working on auditory processing in Parkinson’s disease, and one PhD student working on physiological assessment of attention fluctuation in auditory processing.
I consider myself an active member of the scientific community with over 30 scientific journal publications, and I have received several academic awards. Together with my scientific work, I am an enthusiastic teacher of various courses in audiology and acoustics, and yearly I supervise several master projects, in communication sciences as well as engineering.