Soundscapes Matter – “Science News”

People with dementia are being given peace by creating personalised soundscapes for them.

Talebzadeh’s work focused on “how a personalized soundscape can help those with dementia by providing clues regarding time of day and place. . . . Using a system called AcustiCare, a personalized soundscape is created with a customized algorithm that plays scheduled sounds at specific moments throughout the day. Through feedback, the system can refine the sounds to be played the next day, helping to reinforce time and space for dementia patients. ‘The sounds consist of a collection of natural sounds, birdsongs, outdoor sounds, water/rain sounds and kitchen sounds, music, bell sound, and similar,’ Talebzadeh said. ‘From these sounds, psychoacoustic parameters and metadata is used to obtain similarity information between the different sounds. This information is used to suggest a new sound related to the feedback findings.’”

“Personalized Soundscape Could Help People with Dementia With Time, Place Recognition.”  2021. Press release Acoustical Society of America, http://acousticalsociety.org