Sound, Health, and Memories: Reflections from Danish Sound Day 2023

The auditorium lights dimmed at Copenhagen Hearing & Balance Center yesterday morning, and I felt that familiar buzz, the kind you get when you know you’re about to hear something that matters. Danish Sound Day 2023 had brought together an eclectic crowd: audiologists in crisp white coats, startup founders clutching pitch decks, audio engineers with noise-canceling headphones slung around their necks, and researchers like me, somewhere in between all of it.

The day’s focus was sound in healthcare, how audio technology intersects with healing, well-being, and the delicate machinery of human perception. But as speaker after speaker took the stage, my mind kept wandering seven years back, to a sticky December night in Jakarta.

A Night in the ICU: My First Encounter with Healthcare Soundscapes

It was 2017, and I was deep into my master’s thesis on immersive audio environments for nurse training. The concept seemed straightforward on paper: record realistic ICU soundscapes using 3D ambisonics, then use those recordings to train nursing students in a controlled simulation before they faced the real chaos of critical care.

Simple, right?

Except nothing about recording sound in a hospital ICU is simple.

My classmates and I needed high-fidelity spatial audio, not just the beeping monitors and ventilator hums you’d expect, but the directionality of those sounds. Where is that alarm coming from? How does a nurse’s brain filter signal from noise when twelve machines are competing for attention? To answer those questions, we needed to be in the ICU, microphones and all.

So we did what any slightly desperate, highly motivated grad students would do: we convinced a hospital administrator to let us camp out overnight in one of Indonesia’s busiest ICUs. We had ethics approval and official protocols, of course, but the real challenge wasn’t bureaucracy. It was logistics. We couldn’t bring ICU equipment to our university’s anechoic chamber. We couldn’t schedule “empty room” recording sessions in a facility that operates 24/7. The only way to capture authentic soundscapes was to be there, in the middle of the chaos, recording while the ICU was fully operational. Just three ambisonics mics, a laptop running recording software, and a prayer that security wouldn’t decide our gear looked too suspicious.

I remember the smell most vividly. Antiseptic mixed with something faintly metallic, the air conditioning struggling against Jakarta’s humidity. We set up our gear in a corner, trying to be invisible as nurses moved between beds, checking vitals, adjusting IVs. The soundscape was overwhelming: ventilators cycling in and out of sync, alarms stacked on top of each other, footsteps echoing down hallways, the occasional murmur of a family member pleading with a doctor.

We recorded for eight hours straight. Then, because we’re nerds, we spent another two hours measuring the sound directivity of medical equipment, pointing our microphones at infusion pumps, cardiac monitors, oxygen concentrators, documenting how sound radiates from each device.

Why go to such lengths? Because spatial accuracy matters. If you’re training a nurse to navigate a high-stress environment, the simulation needs to feel real. The beep from a cardiac monitor on the left side of the room should sound like it’s coming from the left, not from some generic stereo speaker setup.

Looking back, that night taught me something I didn’t fully appreciate at the time: sound in healthcare is invisible until it breaks you. Patients can’t sleep. Nurses burn out faster. Families feel more anxious. But nobody talks about it because, well, it’s just noise, right?

Except it’s not.

From Guerrilla Recordings to World-Class Research

Fast forward to yesterday’s event at Rigshospitalet, and the contrast couldn’t be starker. Here, in one of Europe’s leading research hospitals, teams of PhDs and clinicians are systematically studying what we were fumbling toward in that Jakarta ICU, except with proper funding, institutional support, and cutting-edge technology.

The keynote session featured researchers from Copenhagen Hearing & Balance Center walking us through their work. They’re not just recording soundscapes, they’re designing interventions. Soundscapes that help schizophrenia patients manage auditory hallucinations. Audio systems that optimize hospital environments for better sleep. Hearing aids that blur the line between correction and augmentation.

One presentation in particular stuck with me. Katalin Vikuk and Anders Bargum talked about their work using carefully designed audio to help patients with schizophrenia regain control over intrusive voices. The approach is elegant: instead of suppressing hallucinations (which often doesn’t work), they introduce external sounds that patients can learn to distinguish from internal ones, slowly rebuilding a sense of auditory agency.

I found myself nodding along, thinking about those ICU recordings. We were trying to prepare nurses for sensory overload. But what if you could also design hospital soundscapes to reduce that overload in the first place? Not just for staff, but for patients recovering from surgery, families waiting for news, everyone caught in that acoustic pressure cooker.

The thing about sound is that it’s maddeningly personal. A tone that calms one person might spike another’s anxiety. A hospital alarm that’s loud enough to alert a nurse might also jolt a sleeping patient into panic. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, which is both the challenge and the opportunity.

Sleep, Stress, and the Invisible Soundscape

Another session that hit close to home was Kira Vibe Jespersen’s talk on sound and sleep. Hospitals are, ironically, terrible places to rest. Alarms blare. Carts rattle. Conversations echo. And patients, who desperately need sleep to heal, lie awake through it all.

Kira’s research digs into how we can mitigate this. Active noise cancellation for hospital rooms? Ambient soundscapes designed to mask disruptive noise? It sounds futuristic, but the technology exists. The question is whether hospitals, operating on razor-thin margins, will invest in it.

I kept thinking about that Jakarta ICU. The nurses we interviewed afterward all said the same thing: “You get used to it.” But should you have to*? What if we designed healthcare environments where acoustic stress wasn’t just accepted as collateral damage?

Hearing Aids Are Becoming Augmented Reality for Your Ears

One of the most fascinating discussions came during the panel on the future of hearing aids. Alex Costa from GN Group and Nick Hunn from WiFore talked about how these devices are evolving from assistive tools into augmented hearing systems.

Think about it: if you can selectively amplify voices while suppressing background noise, why stop there? Why not add real-time translation? Or directional focus that lets you “zoom in” on a conversation across a crowded room? We’re moving toward a world where hearing aids aren’t just for people with hearing loss, they’re for anyone who wants to optimize how they experience sound.

But here’s where my perceptual evaluation background kicks in: who decides what “optimized” means? If an algorithm enhances your hearing, is it improving fidelity, or is it imposing a version of reality that doesn’t exist? And more importantly, do users feel better with these enhancements, or just different?

This is why subjective evaluation matters. You can measure speech intelligibility all day, but if users don’t trust the sound, they won’t wear the device. Perception is everything.

The Uncomfortable Truth: Research Moves Slowly, Need Moves Fast

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud at these events: most of the innovations presented yesterday won’t reach patients for years, maybe decades.

Why? Because healthcare moves at a glacial pace, and for good reason. You can’t just roll out an experimental soundscape intervention without proving it works across diverse patient populations. Clinical trials take time. Regulatory approval takes time. Convincing risk-averse hospital administrators to adopt new technology takes even more time.

But the need is now. Nurses are burning out. Patients aren’t sleeping. Hospital-acquired delirium is partly driven by sensory overload. We have the research. We have the technology. What we lack is the bridge between lab and bedside.

Denmark has a unique advantage here. The ecosystem is small enough that researchers, industry, and clinicians actually talk to each other. GN Group, EPOS, Cochlear, they’re not just companies, they’re partners in academic research. That kind of collaboration is rare, and it’s Denmark’s best shot at turning sound research into real-world impact.

What I Learned: Sound in Healthcare Needs Perceptual Validation, Not Just Engineering Solutions

If there’s one takeaway from yesterday, it’s this: sound in healthcare is not an engineering problem. It’s a human problem.

You can build the quietest ventilator in the world, but if it still triggers anxiety in a specific patient demographic, you’ve failed. You can design the most sophisticated hearing aid, but if users don’t trust it, they won’t wear it.

This is why my work in perceptual evaluation feels urgent. The future of healthcare audio depends on understanding:

• How does a dementia patient perceive soundscapes differently from a healthy adult?
• What auditory cues help nurses make faster, better decisions under pressure?
• How do we balance auditory privacy with the need for continuous monitoring?

These aren’t questions you answer with microphones and FFT analysis. They require psychoacoustics, user studies, cross-cultural validation. They require interdisciplinary teams willing to ask uncomfortable questions about whether their “solutions” actually solve anything.

Full Circle: From Sneaking Mics into ICUs to Shaping the Future

Sitting in that Rigshospitalet auditorium, I couldn’t help but smile at how far we’ve come. A decade ago, I was a grad student sneaking recording equipment into a hospital, hoping we wouldn’t get thrown out. Yesterday, I watched world-class researchers present meticulously designed studies on the exact same problem, backed by institutional support and millions in funding.

But both efforts came from the same place: a belief that sound matters in healing.

The difference now is that we have the tools, the data, and the momentum to actually do something about it. The question isn’t whether sound technology can improve healthcare. The question is whether we’ll prioritize it, whether hospitals will invest, whether researchers will collaborate, whether policymakers will recognize that better soundscapes aren’t a luxury, they’re a necessity.

I left the event buzzing with ideas, questions, and a strange sense of optimism. Because if Denmark can build an ecosystem where researchers, clinicians, and industry work hand-in-hand on this stuff, maybe, just maybe, the rest of the world will follow. If you want to see the highlight of the event, here is the video.

P.S. If you’re working on healthcare acoustics, perceptual audio research, or just think sound in hospitals deserves more attention, let’s talk. I’d love to hear what you’re working on, and what keeps you up at night (besides hospital alarms). ☕

Tags: #HealthcareAcoustics #PerceptualEvaluation #DanishSoundCluster #SoundAndWellbeing #ICUSoundscapes