Hearing the Café: Aural Diversity in action
The next time you walk into a café, pause for a moment and listen. What do you hear?
Perhaps it’s a closing door, or hissing steam, or clinking cups, or scraping chairs, or animated conversations, or music playing.
For many people this is just normal background noise. The soundscape tells us we are in a lively public place. It creates atmosphere. It feels welcoming.
But not everyone hears this café in the same way.
One of the ideas behind the Aural Diversity research project is that hearing is not a single, uniform human experience. People experience sound very differently depending on their sensory systems, hearing conditions, neurological differences, and the technologies they may rely on.
The café itself does not change. What changes is the way it is perceived.
In the lead-up to Noise Action Week (11–15 May), Andrew Hugill, Chair of the Aural Diversity Network, introduces the concept of aural diversity by exploring how a simple café environment can be experienced very differently by different people.
Let’s imagine several different people entering the same café…
For someone with typical hearing, the soundscape forms a kind of layered background. Individual sounds are noticeable but rarely demanding. The brain filters and sorts them easily into foreground conversation, background chatter, incidental noises, and so on. This is the unconscious ability that allows someone to focus on the voice of a friend across the table even while dozens of other conversations take place nearby. Psychologists call it the “cocktail party effect.”
In this situation the café’s sound becomes social texture. It provides energy and atmosphere without demanding attention. If the café were silent, it might even feel slightly uncomfortable.
Now imagine someone with hearing loss.
Hearing loss does not simply make sound quieter. It affects your ability to distinguish speech from background noise. In a café this means that voices tend to blur together. Consonants disappear. Words become harder to distinguish.
Instead of a pleasant murmur of activity, the room can feel like a confusing wall of sound. Every conversation becomes an effort. You must work constantly to fill in the missing pieces of speech. A relaxed meeting that feels effortless to those with typical hearing becomes exhausting if you have hearing loss.
Next, a hearing-aid user enters the same café.
Modern hearing aids are sophisticated devices that amplify sound and attempt to prioritise speech. Yet cafés remain among the most difficult listening environments. The devices amplify everything: the coffee grinder, the clatter of crockery, the scrape of chair legs. Even with advanced signal processing, it is difficult to distinguish which sounds are important.
Many hearing-aid users therefore develop practical strategies. They may choose a seat facing their conversation partner to allow lip-reading, or avoid sitting near loud machines or speakers. The technology helps enormously, but the acoustic environment still matters.
Someone else enters wearing a cochlear implant.
A cochlear implant works differently from a hearing aid. Instead of amplifying sound, it converts sound into electrical signals that stimulate the auditory nerve directly. Many implant users describe listening as initially mechanical or unfamiliar, especially in complex acoustic spaces.
In a café the mixture of voices, reverberation and background music can become difficult to interpret. Speech may remain intelligible, but the overall soundscape can feel dense and unpredictable. Spaces with softer acoustics, such as carpets, curtains and sound-absorbing materials, often make a noticeable difference.
For someone living with tinnitus, there is a complex relationship between sound and hearing.
Tinnitus is commonly experienced as ringing, buzzing or hissing that has no external source. It may be constant or fluctuate. Sometimes the ambient sounds of a café can actually help by masking the tinnitus, making the internal sound less noticeable. But the opposite can also happen. A loud or harsh acoustic environment may leave the ears feeling fatigued, and the tinnitus can seem louder once the person returns to a quieter place.
The café therefore affects not only the moment of listening, but sometimes how the auditory system feels afterwards.
Now consider the experience of some autistic listeners.
Here the issue may not be hearing loss but sensory processing. Many people rely on the brain’s ability to filter sounds automatically so that unimportant noises fade into the background. But some autistic people experience the soundscape differently. Individual noises may remain sharply distinct: the spoon tapping a cup, the hiss of milk steaming, the rhythm of background music, fragments of conversation behind the shoulder. Instead of merging into a comfortable atmosphere, these sounds compete for attention.
What others experience as a pleasant café ambience can therefore become overwhelming. Many autistic people develop strategies to manage this: choosing quieter cafés, sitting in corners, visiting during off-peak hours, or occasionally using ear defenders or earplugs.
For someone with hyperacusis, which is an extreme sensitivity to sound, even ordinary café noises can become painful. The clatter of crockery, sudden bursts of laughter, or the screech of a chair on the floor may feel physically uncomfortable. The unpredictability of these sounds adds stress. A café that others perceive as sociable and relaxed may instead feel acoustically hazardous.
This is especially true if you experience misophonia. For example, repetitive oral noises such as chewing, crunching or smacking lips are one of the most common triggers, causing extreme distress.
And finally, imagine a Deaf person who communicates primarily through sign language. In this case, sound itself may be less important than visual accessibility. Lighting, seating arrangement and clear sightlines determine whether conversation flows comfortably. A poorly lit table may be a greater barrier than the noise level of the room.
So, the café remains a social space, but the accessibility questions are different.
Designing inclusive acoustics spaces
I have spent several years thinking about experiences like these through the Aural Diversity project. One thing that repeatedly strikes me is how often discussions about noise assume a single, universal listener. We tend to talk about sound environments as if everyone experiences them in roughly the same way.
But the reality is far more varied. The same café may feel pleasantly lively to one person, exhausting to another, painful to a third, and visually comfortable but acoustically irrelevant to someone else. Recognising aural diversity does not mean designing environments perfectly for everyone. That would be impossible.
But it does encourage us to move beyond the idea that there is a single “correct” acoustic environment. Discussions about urban sound often focus on reducing nuisance or lowering decibel levels. Those goals are important, but they only tell part of the story. Why not create spaces that work reasonably well for many different kinds of listeners? In cafés, small changes can make a real difference:
softer furnishings that reduce reverberation
quieter machinery where possible
music played at moderate levels
seating areas with slightly different acoustics characteristics
None of these remove the social energy of a café. They simply make that energy accessible to more people.
For more guidance on designing spaces and environments that meet the needs of everyone, the Aural Diversity Network and ARUP have produced an Aural Diversity Tookit.
Final reflections
So, the next time you walk into a café, pause for a moment and listen.
Not only to the sounds themselves, but to the possibility that no two people in the room may be hearing them in quite the same way.
The café is a shared space, but the sound worlds inside it are plural.
Recognising that plurality is the first step toward creating environments that respect the full range of human hearing
Get involved this Noise Action Week
Noise Action Week is taking place on the 11-15 May, to spread the message that noise matters for our health and wellbeing - and that different people are impacted by noise in different ways. Get involved:
For more information on aural diversity, visit the Aural Diversity Network webpage.
Noise Action Week has developed an aural diversity lesson pack to support teaching young people about aural diversity.
The Noise Action Week communications pack includes ready-to-use social media templates explaining aural diversity and related conditions.
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