Personalised ecologies & hearing loss
Unnithan Kumar, S. & Gaston, K.J. 2026. Auditory perception and the ecology of human-nature interactions: effects of hearing loss on listening to birdsong. People and Nature 7, 3282-3296.
1. The human sensory systems are a primary means through which people experience and connect with nature. Understanding and improving people’s personalised ecologies—their embodied, sensory interactions with other organisms—is key to addressing the causes and consequences of the extinction of experience and ecological grief prevalent in industrialised society.
2. Despite this importance, to date there has been little quantitative research into how varying sensory capabilities may result in people having very different personalised ecologies.
3. In this paper, we investigate how human–nature interactions can vary for people with different hearing acuities. We combine data on age-related hearing loss with frequency-amplitude profiles of birdsong for ten bird species in the United Kingdom, to estimate how the ability to hear bird vocalisations at a given distance may change with age.
4. Our results suggest that the ability to perceive birdsong, and the distances at which songs can be heard, are likely to decrease dramatically for older listeners, with perceptual differences being more pronounced for birds which sing at higher frequencies. Moreover, with age-related hearing loss, birdsong may lose its perceived richness, become apparently more similar between species, and be less distinguishable from other sounds, particularly for higher frequency vocalisations.
5. These findings have significant implications for personalised ecologies and citizen science. We advocate for greater attention to the primacy of sensory perception in human–nature interactions, and an awareness of how variation in sensory capabilities may result in people experiencing nature very differently.