SOUND, ENVIRONMENT AND AGEING: BRINGING THE OUTSIDE INTO CARE HOMES

The research is being carried out with charities that work with older people, to make soundtracks of natural sounds that are then shared with people living in care homes. The project aims to evaluate what the impact of taking these outside sounds into care homes might be on the older people living in such institutional settings. Sounds recorded with the project team of birdsong, sea, rivers, forest walks for example, will be played through special headsets that offer the listener an immersive listening experience that takes them out of the care home, and into the natural world. We estimate, based on previous projects, that there will be affective responses to these sounds that can impact on wellbeing and in consultation with care home workers, older people not living in care homes and care home residents. The potential future applications would be most likely to be an app for use in care home settings.

This two-year project explores whether nature based acoustic experiences can support the mental wellbeing of older adults experiencing soundscape deprivation in care home residential settings.

The soundscapes will be co-composed with community-based reference participants (i.e. physically mobile older people) who will monitor, select, and record biophony and geophony using specialist equipment, including third-order ambisonics, interference tube microphones, and parabolic reflectors. These recording techniques augment human listening capabilities and are typically used by recording professionals to achieve spatially immersive recordings, and to remotely record sounds as though they were nearby.

This process of listening, recording, and curating will result in approximately ten different natural sound listening experiences, for use by older people in institutional settings with restricted mobility. The finished co-compositions will be trialed by 40 residents across eight residential care home on three delivery systems. The first system, will include static binaural renderings of the audio using over-ear headphones. The second, will deliver a head tracked rendering of the audio via Apple's Spatial Audio implementation of Dolby Atmos, using Apple's AirPods Max headphones. The third will deliver a Dolby Atmos Master to groups of participants, using a multichannel loudspeaker system as appropriate to the room, and of no more than 7.1.4 specification.

Each soundscape and delivery method will be assessed for suitability for use with care home residents and for its ease of use for facilitators. Participants will also take part in exit conversations when they, or their care workers, or, as the BGS terms it 'family consultees' will record their feelings about the participation. The project will result on an open access suite of 10 soundscapes and a project manual called 'Sage Sounds'.