At a Coldplay concert in Mumbai in January 2025, a deaf teacher named Priya Mohan wore a vibration vest that translated the music into sensation throughout her body. When the band played "Yellow," she started to cry — and then she danced. For the first time, she danced at a concert, Priya told Forbes India.

Hearing loss definitely takes things from us. This edition is about getting music back in your life. The technology in concert halls, in hearing aids, in people's chests — is making the war for music winnable!

My name is Mark Parkinson and I am Co-founder of hearUcan. I wore hearing aids for 12 years and now have bi-lateral cochlear implants. I founded the hearUcan community to help those with hearing loss navigate what can be a very confusing and frustrating journey. Family members, friends, work colleagues, and the stranger at the cash register - they’re all on this journey with you.

Let’s get started……

1. Tell your audiologist music matters to you. Speech-in-noise performance is the standard measure of hearing aid success. If you care about music, say so explicitly at every appointment. Ask for a dedicated music program like Meludia. Ask whether the device you're considering has a low-delay processing mode — the difference between 0.5ms and 8ms of processing delay is audible in live acoustic settings. If music is 30% of why you wear your aids, make sure your audiologist knows that before they program anything.

2. If you stream music to your hearing aids, the device you started with matters less than the settings. Streaming routes audio directly through the telecoil or Bluetooth receiver, bypassing microphones entirely — this is often significantly better than ambient pickup for music. Most people with hearing aids have never explored their streaming settings for music specifically. Again, let your audiologist know you are streaming on a regular basis.

3. Apple Music Haptics, (iOS 19 or later)now includes vocals-only haptic feedback and adjustable intensity. For anyone who uses physical sensation as part of how they experience music — and many people with hearing loss do — this feature works on iPhone 12 and later and takes about 30 seconds to enable. Settings → Accessibility → Music Haptics.

Our take: Experimentation is key. Every single one of us is different. Get curious and playful about your approach to music. The Apple Music Haptics option, blew us away.

More on Meludia Music Rehabilitation Platform | Set up Music Haptics on your iPhone

It doesn't just muffle or mask it. That's the part most people — including audiologists — really struggle to explain. 

For hearing aid users, the most important thing most audiologists never say: hearing aids are designed and optimized for speech. Music mode is not an afterthought — it is fundamentally different processing. Speech algorithms compress dynamic range, strip high-frequency detail, and apply noise reduction that actively works against music. Ask your audiologist explicitly to optimize a music program. Ask about Real Ear Measurement for music specifically. And consider Widex — their Allure platform's PureSound architecture runs at roughly 0.5ms processing delay, designed specifically to preserve the timing and phase cues that make music sound like music rather than a recording of music.

For CI users, a 2025 study in Audiology and Neurotology compared cochlear implant users to people with normal hearing on a specific task: identifying whether a piece of music was joyful or sad. CI users could feel the energy of music comparably to hearing listeners. But they showed significantly greater difficulty identifying its emotional direction. The volume was there. The feeling of whether it was reaching toward something or pulling away from it — that was gone.

The science behind this has a name: temporal fine structure. The rapid oscillations that carry pitch, timbre, and instrument identity — what makes a cello sound like a cello and not a car horn — are what hearing loss and device processing struggle most to preserve. A cochlear implant works with 22 electrodes to cover the frequency range that 3,500 hair cells handled before. A hearing aid uses a sophisticated amplifier and compression software. The math of that compression is audible.

More on Widex Allure | Widex Allure review → Soundly

In May 2026, a writer named Andrew Bellavia sat in the farthest seat from the stage at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center and listened to the New York Philharmonic through Auracast — Bluetooth LE Audio broadcast streaming directly to his hearing aids. He heard page turns. He heard the spatial width of the string section. He heard the orchestra, he wrote for Hearing Health & Technology Matters, as if "the Philharmonic is in my library, playing just for me."

Auracast is not a new idea — it is a new standard. It broadcasts audio like a public radio station: any compatible hearing aid or earbud within range can receive it, without pairing, without a counter visit, without telling anyone you need it. The setup at Lincoln Center took 30 minutes. The experience, for someone who had been avoiding concert halls for years because the effort of straining to hear outweighed the reward, is not incremental. It is a different category of access.

Lincoln Center is not alone. In April 2026, eight of London's most prominent theatres — Sondheim, Noël Coward, Gielgud, Novello, Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, Victoria Palace, Wyndham's — installed Auracast through Delfont Mackintosh. The National Theatre piloted it in February. In South Korea, a K-pop concert at Jamsil Indoor Stadium used Auracast in an access pilot — and reported that approximately 64% of participants were attending a K-pop concert for the first time. Access technology did not improve the experience for people already attending. It brought people in who had stopped going.

This matters because of a number that sits behind all of it: 52% of disabled music fans avoid gigs because of poor accessibility. That is from a 2025 Transreport survey of more than 1,000 disabled people and families. It is not a technology problem alone — poor sightlines, untrained staff, inaccessible transport, the social barrier of sitting apart from the people you came with. But the audio piece of it is the one that technology is now solving, venue by venue.

If you have hearing aids: ask whether the venue has Auracast or a hearing loop before you book. If your aids were purchased before 2024, they may not yet support Auracast — check with your audiologist whether firmware or an upgrade changes that. If you use a Roger On device, connection should be quick and easy.

Our take: Auracast is changing the game, especially for music, but for any public performance. Stay tuned for a future hearing tech issue when we will dig deep on some of these enabling technologies.

Lincoln Center Auracast | Eight London theatres | K-Pop and Auracast

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.