Profile

I used to want to be a musician, and I spent most of my time at school practicing the clarinet and piano. During my music degree at university, I took a course on music psychology, and I was hooked! I realised that I loved thinking about how we hear sound, and how we use it to communicate with each other. So although musician and psychologist are very different jobs, I don’t feel as though I’ve left my past behind me — I still get to spend lots of time thinking about sound!

In my spare time, I play tiddlywinks in national tournaments, do crosswords and go Molly dancing (which is a type of traditional English folk dancing, a bit like Morris dancing!).

My PhD project was about politicians and the way they talk when they’re making speeches. I was particularly interested in how they use rhythm, since lots of people have suggested that politicians talk with a stronger rhythm or “beat” when making speeches. I wanted to know if this was true, and if it was, then why? Does rhythm make people pay more attention, or maybe feel more connected to the person speaking?

Since finishing my PhD I’ve worked on several different projects about communication. One was about music therapy, and how it might help us to understand and treat certain mental health disorders. Another project was about the judgements we make about people from their voices: do we use the sound of people’s voices to try to work out if they’re trustworthy or friendly? But most of my work since my PhD has been about about listening in noisy environments, like a busy restaurant or classroom. I want to know why it’s particularly hard for some people (like older people) to understand speech when there’s background noise, and why some types of background noise are more distracting than others.

My studies usually involve creating sound recordings for people to listen to, and then recording their responses to analyse later. For example, I might record somebody talking, then mix the speech with a recording of background noise to make it harder to hear. I’ll then play people these “noisy” recordings and see how much of the speech they could understand, and compare this for different types of background noise!

What I do at work depends on where I am with a project. If it’s early days, I’ll spend lots of time reading relevant books and articles, talking to the other scientists I work with, and drafting ideas for experiments. Then I’ll need to do lots of technical work to get an experiment set up, including recording sounds for participants to listen to, and setting up computers to record their responses. During the the middle of a project, I’ll probably be working with the participants who take part in my experiments and collecting data from them. I might also be starting to analyse that data. Towards the end of a project, I’ll be doing lots of data analysis, and starting to write up my results.

While all of this is going on, I’ll also be supervising students, and every so often I take part in events with members of the public (like you!) to explain about our research!