Centre expertise 

The Hearing Research Centre brings together more than 70 researchers from across all four faculties, combining expertise in hearing, language and linguistics, communication, engineering, psychological sciences, AI, engineering, and more. The Centre’s mission is to innovate and transform hearing health for all, and this can only be achieved by combining wide interests, skills and talents, and by adopting a collaborative and inclusive approach. 

Research themes 

• To employ a public health and co-design approach to transform hearing health and inform healthcare practice and policies for healthy listening and communication in Australia and globally. 
• Explore the fundamental bases of human hearing and its critical role in healthy communication, individual wellbeing and social connectedness. 
• Translate research and transform the design and development of assessments, environments, interventions and technologies supporting communication needs. 
• Improve current solutions and generate an entirely new class of hearing therapies and platforms informed by, and suited to the improvement of, human hearing abilities. 

Centre leadership 

Distinguished Professor David McAlpine, Department of Linguistics; Professor Bamini Gopinath, Macquarie Cochlear Chair in Hearing and Health; Professor Catherine McMahon Department of Linguistics; and Dr Romaric Bouveret, Macquarie University Hearing Director of Strategy and Operations. 

Key partners 

The Centre is uniquely positioned to deliver on its mission because of its partnership with the Australian Hearing Hub. Members include Cochlear, Hearing Australia, National Acoustic Laboratories, NextSense and The Shepherd Centre, all of whom are regularly engaged in impactful and multidisciplinary research. Another key partner is the Macquarie Speech and Hearing Clinic. 

A research partnership with Google’s Digital Future Initiative brings together Google, Macquarie University Hearing, Cochlear, National Acoustic Laboratories, NextSense and the Shepherd Centre, to explore new possibilities and AI solutions for hearing healthcare.

The Hearing Research Centre also works in partnership with community groups located at the Australian Hearing Hub, including Parents of Deaf Children, Hear For You and Hearing Matters Australia.   

Current projects include 

Hearing Impairment Data Infrastructure (HEIDI)
Project lead: Professor Gopinath 

The HEIDI project aims to establish a national data resource to slow the course of adult-onset hearing loss. This big data project will transform our understanding of how adults with hearing loss navigate the care pathway, from general practice to the audiology clinic. The project aims to: (i) generate a centralised repository of large, heterogeneous datasets providing a comprehensive view of the patient journey; (ii) create data-driven decision support tools that can be integrated into general practice workflows, to motivate and empower GPs and their patients to better address hearing health. The impact of this project is set to significantly improve access to care and the patient experience. 

Forming and following auditory objects
Project lead: Professor McAlpine 

Problems understanding speech in background noise are an early sign of hearing loss. This project will determine brain mechanisms that support ‘cocktail party listening’, and how this is affected by hearing impairment. Employing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)—neuroimaging technology that uses light to infer changes in cortical neural activity—it will explore how accurately representing the statistical structure of background sounds improves listening abilities in challenging acoustic environments. Unlike other brain-imaging technologies, fNIRS is compatible with hearing aids and cochlear implants and can be used to explore ways in which technological solutions to hearing loss can be enhanced to connect users to their listening environments. This project is funded by the William Demant Foundation.

Developing realistic hearing assessments
Project lead: Associate Professor Jorg Buchholz 

Communication in the real world requires attending to one or more people while filtering out distractions like background noise, other people talking and reverberation. Successful listening in such dynamic, complex environments is strongly impacted by hearing loss, cognitive decline and other age-related factors. Despite the complexity of these environments, current clinical hearing assessments largely rely on pure tone audiometry and other tests that use artificial sounds. The aim of the ECological Hearing Outcomes (ECHO) Laboratory is to bring the real world into the laboratory so that listening can be assessed in controlled environments while providing outcomes that are representative of an individual’s real-world listening experience and disability. In pursuit of this, the Centre has engineered 3D audio and video technologies that allow the recording and reproduction of authentic real-world scenes in the laboratory. This project has also developed and validated listening tasks that go beyond the detection of tones and simple word recall, assessing speech comprehension, interactive communication and spatial awareness. Using these realistic assessments, the Centre can provide a research and development platform that allows evaluation of the benefit of hearing aids, cochlear implants and other hearing technologies. 

LEAP-HEAR 
Project lead: Professor McMahon 

Middle ear disease (known as otitis media or OM) in Aboriginal children is highly prevalent (occurring at three times the rate of non-Indigenous children), occurs earlier, lasts longer than non-Indigenous children, and disrupts critical periods of literacy and language development. This program is delivered in partnership with Macquarie University’s Djurali Centre and aims to mitigate the effects of ear disease and hearing loss in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children by: (i) strengthening and robustly evaluating three long-standing pre-school and school hearing screening programs in three Aboriginal communities in NSW; (ii) establishing an effective and scalable model for national roll out.

The Australian Eye and Ear Health Survey
Project lead: Professor Gopinath 

The Australian Eye and Ear Health Survey was launched in 2022 with the goal of recruiting 5000 adults from 30 sites across urban, regional and remote regions in Australia. This is the first national survey to assess both vision and hearing loss and provides contemporary data on risk factors as well as information on the health and social impacts of sensory impairments in Australian adults. It is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care and the Martin Lee Centre for Innovations in Hearing Health. 

How to engage with the Hearing Research Centre 

Staff interested in contributing to the works of the Centre are encouraged to contact  Professor David McAlpine, Professor Bamini Gopinath, Professor Catherine McMahon or Dr Romaric Bouveret.