Music Puzzle

Abstract

At Tsukuba University of Technology (NTUT), a special university for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) and visually handicapped, I work with DHH students. Teaching them gives me the opportunities to encounter diverse, sound acceptance and communication methods. With the improvement of speech recognition technology and the performance of hearing devices such as cochlear implants or hearing aids, as well as the established training for speech, DHH people are becoming better at acquiring sounds in terms of speech ‒ by eliminating non-verbal sounds. However, DHH people still have difficulties in listening to non-verbal sounds ‒ environmental sounds and music that exists around us in everyday life. I found that many of them are very fond of music despite their hearing loss. For DHH students to obtain information and enjoyment from environmental sounds and music, I introduce Music Puzzle, which is our original music game for improving listening to non-verbal sounds.