Mumbli's Hearing Wellness Library

By now you probably know that we are absolutely obsessed with sound and are on a journey to explore every single topic do with it. So, if you’re anything like us, stay tuned!This week we’ve immersed ourselves in ASMR, also known as brain tingles – the unique internet sensation that has taken the world by storm in the last couple of years.

Wellness is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days - whether it’s about yoga, veganism or mindfulness. But we don’t often give any thought to our hearing. Shouldn’t we look after our hearing wellness in the same way as we might look after our diets or our eyesight?From work to travel, home to meeting friends, every day we encounter a whole host of sounds that have the ability to influence us positively or negatively. And it’s not just our hearing that’s affected. Even when we’re wearing noise-cancelling headphones, sound can impact both our physical and mental health in more ways than you might imagine!So, when it comes to wellness, there’s more to it than meets the eye.

The ocean has become a very noisy place.A recent study in March 2022 showed that climate change will significantly change how sound travels underwater, potentially affecting natural soundscapes as well as accentuating human-generated noise. These alterations to the ocean soundscapes could impact essential activities of underwater marine life.

We have all enjoyed it, we have all fallen in love with it. Moving at different frequencies, the magic of music has made many people around the world tap their fingers and bust a move without even physically realising it. To understand the reason behind this, scientists have researched for years to study the effects of music on the brain.This article will explain exactly how music affects the brain, based on those research works.

After months of silence, cafes have reopened, restaurants are filling up again and outdoor concerts are all the rage. In a nutshell, the world just got a whole lot noisier! But did you know that only 1.3% of us actually enjoy going to noisy places?!

Have you always assumed that most celebrities live perfect lives? We’ve compiled a list of inspirational, famous figures living with hearing reduction that you might have never known about!‘Action on Hearing Loss’, conducted a study in Deaf Awareness week, showing that 89% of people still feel there’s a stigma around hearing reduction and have been discriminated against. This hasn’t stopped the success of these celebrities and influential figures and you’ll be surprised at who we found out has reduced hearing. It shows that we’re not defined by hearing reduction, and we shouldn’t let it stop us from doing the things we love!

There’s a fair chance that there’s a sound that drives you up the wall. Everyone has at least one sound they wish they could avoid hearing.Think about a sound that particularly irritates you. How does it make you feel?Maybe it’s your friend chewing very loudly, your coworker continually tapping their pen at the table, or the infamous nails on the chalkboard. Everyone gets annoyed by certain sounds, but for people who experience misophonia, it’s taking that to the extreme.

Do you hate the sound of chalk on a blackboard? Does the sound of chewing or slurping drive you up the wall? Or does the noise from roadworks across the street do your head in?Believe it or not, ordinary sounds cause many of us to feel negative emotions, such as irritation, stress, anxiety or worry. But despite this, most of us don’t make conscious decisions about the types and levels of sounds we experience day-to-day.So, what are the different levels of hearing sensitivity? And where do you fit in on the scale? Here’s the lowdown.

We often talk about different noises and how they affect us. But did you know that categorising people based on how sensitive you are to sounds could change the way you think about social settings? Thanks to the University of Salford and Eden Smith’s Group’s Nurture Programme, we were able to work with data science student Kaveh Kiani – who will soon join us full-time at Mumbli as a data scientist – to analyse different people’s hearing sensitivity and personal responses to social spaces in London.

When it comes to tech, hearables are as close to developing a new superpower as we think you can get. Cancelling out background noise, amplifying the voice of a chosen person, translating languages you don’t understand... Just like how everyone’s ears process sound differently, the possibilities when it comes to hearables are endless!

While many countries have lifted their face mask mandatory rule for those who are vaccinated, wearing a mask is still very much a part of many people's lives. Although face masks provide a set of benefits, they can also bring a whole set of challenges while wearing them on, and communicating with one another.In this article, we shall uncover the various challenges, reasons, and solutions for how facemasks can affect our communication.

According to the World Health Organisation, more than 15% of us live with some degree of hearing reduction. On top of this, more than 1.1 billion people aged 12 to 35 have early signs of hearing reduction due to the noise of everyday life. We’ve all heard of hearing 'loss', hearing ‘reduction’, and hearing ‘problems’.It all sounds a bit negative, don’t you think?But what if, instead of trying to solve a ‘problem’, we could use the right tools to unlock our hearing and achieve the full potential of our experience of sound? That’s what we call making Hearing Gains.

We have all googled for the images from Mars, and yet for years, we have never been able to capture the sounds that go on there.That is until now!

What’s gigantic, popular and as loud as a power saw at a rock concert? Depending on which line and stop you’re on – the London Underground. The city’s rapid mass transit network has a big noise issue. Passengers, underground workers and anyone who goes near a tube station can hear it. And now, underground users are making sure their pain can be heard too.

Despite everything that London has to offer, the commotion may occasionally get a little much and is not always a place to unwind. Grab your camera and tour these tranquil spots from our list of quiet treasures; they are so serene you won't believe they are in London.

We don’t know about you, but we’re tired of meeting friends at bars where we have to shout to make ourselves heard. And we’re tired of turning up to concerts that cause our ears to ring all night.Why can’t we enjoy sound? Like, really enjoy it?In the same way you might treat your tastebuds at a gourmet restaurant, or feast your eyes on a masterpiece at the Tate?That’s why we’re so excited about the growing popularity of listening bars.

Written by: Sydney AmoakohIt’s happened to all of us. Those days where you can’t remember where you left your keys, or what you were supposed to do this afternoon. But that song you learned when you were 13 is clear in your mind, down to every last backup vocal and double entendre you hadn’t understood as a tweenager.More baffling still — you step right back into how that song used to make you feel. Why is that? Our brains were built to connect sounds with our feelings, mindsets, and memories as a way of surviving.

There haven’t been a lot of positives about the Covid lockdowns, but one of the few which has been widely reported is that we can hear birdsong again. As traffic volume has diminished and we work at home, the level of noise around us has fallen to a point that most of us can’t remember.

Imagine this. It’s Christmas day, dinner is ready, you take your first bite into your roast potato and there’s no crunch. How disappointing!Recent research claims that the sound of our food influences the way it tastes. In fact, Charles Spence even won a Nobel Prize for his research into sound and food, which he also focuses on in his book, Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating.In short, the sound of your food is more important than you think – from the snap of your crisps to the crunch of your roast potatoes. If you can enhance the sound of the foods you eat, you may even find them even more delicious.

During this time when our mind is in a difficult place and anxiety might be even more challenging to deal with now than ever before, we wanted to talk about sound therapy.Healing with sound is believed to help increase productivity, flare-up creativity, enhance our overall mental wellness, and even cure mental disorders. How? Let's find out

Reverberation time is the time it takes for a sound to ‘fade away’ or ‘decay’ after the sound source has stopped. Think about it: if you’re sat across from your friend in an echoey restaurant, it’s going to be so much harder to hear what they’re saying – regardless of how loud it actually is!Thanks to the University of Salford and Eden Smith Group’s Nurture Programme, we were able to work with data science student (and Mumbli intern!) Karishma Prasad to analyse the reverberation times in London social spaces. The aim was to come up with a model that could predict reverberation times in empty and busy venues.

Pollution kills. And we’re not just talking the kind you inhale when you’re cycling behind a double-decker bus, or breathing in someone else’s cigarette smoke. We’re talking about a type of pollution you don’t smell at all.That’s right, we’re talking noise pollution. This (not so silent) killer causes 48,000 new cases of ischemic heart disease and 12,000 premature deaths every year in Europe alone, according to the European Environment Agency. It can result in stress, anxiety, high blood pressure and even an increased risk of heart attacks (read our article on 5 ways sound affects the human body to find out more).And it’s got us thinking… is anyone actually doing anything about it??Well… yes! There are cities around the world doing some pretty cool things to tackle their noise pollution. We’ve taken a look at a few of them here.

In today's world, mental and physical pressure is something we are all facing down to the core. To keep up with the world’s spirit and fire up our day-to-day confidence, it is always important to heal along the process. If you are like us, then I’m sure you are looking for a way by which you can heal yourself with the help of sound. Sure !! some sounds are amazing and calming like the sound of the ocean waves or soothing like that of wind chimes. But there are also those irritating sounds, like that of a traffic jam or that unforgivable alarm which you just keep forgetting to switch off the previous night. So, can sound actually heal you? Let’s find out.

The noisy world we live in suddenly became a whole lot quieter when the Coronavirus pandemic hit. So much so, that science journalist Andreas von Bubnoff and designer and art director Veronica Semeco decided to capture the change in the world’s soundscapes through a new initiative – the Pandemic Silence Project.

From World Hearing Day, 3rd March 2022, Londoners will be able to enjoy the sweet sounds of the world’s first Hearing Wellness District, a sensory sanctuary for all those seeking the right balance of socialisation and peace of mind. The District will launch at East London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the pilot site for a start-up-led program that aims to make hearing wellness and healthy sound experiences a standard feature of public spaces worldwide.

Imagine this. You’re at a concert with friends when someone leans over and shouts in your ear: ‘what colour is this song?’Would you have an answer for them? Or would you think they’d gone stark raving mad?While some of us wouldn’t even know where to start, there are others of us who would find the question perfectly natural. One in 3,000 of us, to be precise! These are the relatively unusual individuals who have something called ‘sound-to-colour synesthesia’ – otherwise known as chromesthesia.

Stranger Things Season 4 debuted this summer with plot twists, 80s nostalgia – and a viral trend on sound healing. The use of a Kate Bush hit song as this season’s ‘unexpected hero’ drove fans to TikTok, Twitter, Reddit and every platform in between to share what song would save them from horrific fantasy dimensions (or bad days in real life). The idea that ‘music saves lives’ is no shocker. But people’s answers to the trending question, which range from, ‘anything by ABBA’ to Childish Gambino’s ‘Redbone’, highlight something that’s a little less obvious – the healing power of music isn’t exclusive to just one genre.

As part of our research when we were forming Mumbli, we interviewed a range of sound professionals, from musicians to sound designers to producers.One thing that we really wanted to know was ‘What language do you use to describe music day-to-day?’’Here are just a few of the examples they gave us…

Have you ever stopped to wonder about the sounds around you?While you’ve been busy doing your laundry, washing dishes and heating up your microwave meals, a revolution’s been occurring that we bet you didn’t even notice!And no, we’re not talking about veganism or the age of the Kanken backpack. We’re talking about the growing movement that’s seen washing machines learn how to play the harp and ovens taking up an instrument you’ve probably never even heard of (the kalimba...?!).

The world is too noisy. Anyone who’s been following Mumbli over the last couple of years will have heard this mantra repeated over and over again. Not only does it form the backbone of why I created Mumbli, but it’s also a personal ‘slogan’ that I’ve come to live my life by. And then, in 2020, a pandemic hit.I know that this has been a hard time for everybody, and the last thing I want is to come across as insensitive. But the truth is… I’ve loved it. Let me explain.

You’ve just sat down for an important video call with your boss but the kids start screaming, your next-door neighbour has started mowing the lawn and your dog won’t shut up either. We’ve all been there. As we all know, these unusual times have brought about a lot of shifts in the way we work. Webinars and video calls have become the ‘new normal’. This has brought to our attention the interruptions that we now have to deal with because of the distractions around us at home we haven’t dealt with before. I think we can all agree that not only are these noises obstructive, but they are also irritating and even embarrassing…

You’ve swiped, matched and exchanged your best jokes - now one of you has to suggest a date night!But most of London’s dating spots are strangely unfit for purpose. They’re either so loud you have to shout into each other’s ear canals, or so quiet that any brief pause feels long enough to stream an entire Netflix show.To give everyone a fighting chance, we’ve measured the acoustic performance of hundreds of venues across the city - from pubs and restaurants to bars and clubs. And we’re delighted to share the first ‘Mumbli Certified’ venues in London. At these venues, we can guarantee sound levels that will actually allow you to hold a conversation (without the need for a megaphone) - whether it’s the first date or the 500th!

Think back to the last time you went out to work, meet, or date.Were you yelling into a friend’s ear and leaving with a sore throat, or were you sitting back enjoying a relaxing chat? Could you feel the thump of speakers through the floor, or was it the scraping of cutlery that caught your attention?No matter where you go, you can’t escape the sound.So, as a venue, it’s important to get it right!

Have you ever found yourself drifting off to Jamie Dornan’s deep, soft voice? Or maybe you’ve caught yourself dreaming of Scarlett Johannson’s breathy utterances? You’re not alone!We’ve all had it where you meet someone for the first time and you’re surprised by their voice. Perhaps you’re expecting your boss to have a much lower voice or your Hinge date looks amazing on their profile but then they open their mouth and the attraction has instantly disappeared…

How often do you stop and appreciate your hearing? If you’re like most people, you probably don’t even think about your hearing until it affects how you communicate with people or listen to music.We’re exposed to thousands of sounds every day, and some are just way more pleasant than others. But why do we prefer to hear certain sounds? And why do we instantly feel happy when we notice them?

On World Hearing Day 2022, WHO focused on the importance of safe listening as a means of maintaining good hearing across the life course, and issued a new international standard for safe listening at venues and events. The standard applies to places and activities where amplified music is played.