Background: Difficulty in understanding lyrics can be a major barrier to music enjoyment for people with hearing loss (Greasley et al., 2020, doi:10.1080/14992027.2020.1762126). One of the aims of the CADENZA project is to run machine-learning challenges to optimise technology to improve lyric understanding without sacrificing overall enjoyment of the music. To achieve this optimisation, developers need lyric-intelligibility metrics that are informed by the experiences of the target population. Currently, there are no data on the ability of older individuals with hearing loss to understand and recall lyrics.

Methods: Thirteen older participants with mostly mild-sloping hearing loss listened to and recalled 100 segments of popular music that varied in genre, duration and word count. These segments were used in a previous lyric intelligibility study with younger students without hearing loss. In each trial, participants heard a randomly chosen segment that was presented twice with a 5-s interstimulus interval over headphones at an A-weighted level of 65 dB plus individualised frequency-dependent gain (CAMFIT-nonlinear).

Results: The proportion of words heard correctly varied greatly across samples, from 0-100%, and varied as a function of genre. In comparison with the previous study using these stimuli with a different population, the results were reasonably well correlated, but there were several samples that were either easier or more difficult to recall for the older participants with HL. Individual intelligibility across samples was correlated with age; sample intelligibility across individuals and genres, however, was not correlated with word count or rate.

Conclusions: Improving the intelligibility of sung lyrics for those with hearing loss is a different challenge from spoken-speech enhancement. Not only does the enhancement need to be considered within the overall enjoyment of the music, but the variation in results — as seen in the current study — reflects variations in genre, orchestration and vocal quality in sung music.