Giants of Audiology: Interview with Harvey Dillon, PhD

Welcome to This Week in Hearing and our special series, ‘Giants in Audiology’. Hello, I’m Bob Traynor, your host for this episode. Today, it’s my honor to present my friend and colleague, Dr. Harvey Dillon, former director, National Acoustics Laboratory, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Currently, Dr. Dillon is a professor of audiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, and until recently was also a professor of audiology at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. While a professor of audiology these days, he spent a 47-year career in research, developing patents, publications, mentoring young people, and providing leadership at the National Acoustics Laboratory, as well as the two universities we just mentioned, and additionally educating the rest of the world. In audiology and hearing science. And I might add, through the eyes of a psychoacoustician and electrical engineer. So thanks so much for being with us here at This Week in Hearing, Harvey. We very much appreciate the opportunity to bring your journey in audiology to the rest of the world.

Thanks, Bob. It’s a real honor to be doing this. So let’s get it.

Let’s go. Well, the first thing we do is talk about the early years. And, and of course, there’s a beautiful picture of, of you as about a 4-year-old in front of a whole patch of some, something that’s growing on by the fence there.

I have, I have no memory of that whatsoever. My first memory is age 5 when we moved house, and this was definitely before that. So, yep.

Well, the And I understand that, that you were kind of a guy who as a young, young child were kind of looking at how things worked and taking everything apart and, and, and that kind of a person.

Absolutely. I love pulling things apart and it was even a bonus if I could get them back together again. I was just curious about stuff, how things worked, I think would summarize it.

Well, and, and it sounds to me like you’re still curious about how things work, only gets pretty sophisticated stuff these days. Although you can’t tear them apart and figure it out. You have to kind of work through a whole different situation to do that. And it looks like you kind of went to a public school and pretty much in Sydney there. And we even had, you even sent me a shot of your high school with a few cars there, but not much about what the school is. It’s just a lot of cars in the parking lot. So there must have been a lot going on at that school.

I couldn’t find much. So you have local, the local primary school, which was a happy time. Actually, I was a bit of an entrepreneur there. Only time I’ve been an entrepreneur in my life, I think I my brother made me a machine for marbles. Little, look, little mouse holes in it. And you put it some distance away and if kids would shoot their marbles towards it, if it went in the hole, they’d get that number of marbles. But of course they nearly always missed. It was much harder than it looked. So I ended up just accumulating marbles during my career in primary school. Then the high school was a local public high school. I could walk to school. I liked it. It wasn’t hugely significant to me that the things that I remember most fondly being in the cadets and man, it was a different time. And I found this photo to send you with me with a rifle at home. In those days, you would send the kids home with a .303 rifle, I think without the bolt. But I was the staff sergeant in the cadets, which meant that I was responsible for 80 .303 rifles with their bolts and 2 Bren guns. And it’s just such a different day and age from what we’re in now. The other thing I liked about, I liked during that time was the hobby was building airplanes, model that I had plastic airplanes strung up across my room, the ones that you put in kits and also rubber-powered ones and then motorized ones that you would fly around and around in a circle. I was absolutely determined for all the way through high school, I was going to be an aeronautical engineer, was my plan. Wow.

And that was right up until you started going to the university, right?

Yeah, you go through a stage where you apply for a particular course at a particular uni, and I was literally poised to enroll in aeronautical engineering and Somebody said to me, you know that there’s no planes designed in Australia, don’t you? And I didn’t know that. I had gotten, I had gotten interested in, in electricity through the course of physics. So I applied for electrical engineering instead. I still kept my job at the hobby shop though. When I was about 15, looking like I was about 12, I think. I went along and said, I’d like to get a job here selling, selling model airplanes. And they kind of laughed at me, but I was determined. So every 3 months, 6 months, I don’t know, I’d go back and say, I still like a job here. Eventually they gave me a job and selling toys, but after a year they promoted me to selling airplanes and I was, I was in heaven there. So I kept that job through, through most of the uni course as well.

Well, yeah. And, sounds like it was kind of cool because you could walk to the job and walk to school and the whole thing kind of all in one place where a lot of us, when we go to college, we have to leave home and go on into someplace else, find some sort of other job that we may not like nearly as much and all that kind of thing.

So, I was lucky. Now, the job was in town. I had to get a bus there, but that was still no big deal. And, I was living at home too well into my mid-20s. Yeah.

Wow. And again, kept your job as an undergraduate, and it looks like you had a special professor as an undergraduate that kind of mentored you in this certain way.

Yeah, it was, I guess he was my favorite professor during the undergraduate course, and he was teaching about measurements, so I just got interested in measurements. And actually that started back in high school. The bit of schoolwork that I remember most passionately was the physics course in, or the science course in, and the physics bits of it in high school. And I think I’ve still got my prac book somewhere. So I fell in love with that idea that you could have a theory, you could set up an experiment, you could test the theory and see if the whole thing fitted together. So that really resonated with me. And so I guess when I got to uni and there was a professor whose was involved in measurement, that appealed to me. So I liked uni, I really enjoyed it. And I thought universities are pretty good places. I’d like to become a university lecturer was my plan. And someone said, well, you’re gonna need a PhD. So I went along to that professor and said, can I do a PhD? And he said, sure, sure. And he started me on a topic called International Time Synchronization by Satellites. And this was in a time when, you know, clocks in different countries were not synchronized to the nearest nanosecond or whatever they are now. And the idea was to try and improve that by sending signals around the world through satellites. I spent 6 months on it learning about the stuff and really I got so bored. I thought this is going to comprise me sending lots of letters to people in other countries, asking them to inject a signal in a satellite for somebody else to measure. And around that same time, somebody gave me a record of a synthesizer and I thought, what? You can make music with electricity and electricity alone. And that just appealed to me. So I went along to another professor there, and this is 6 months into this PhD, and said, you are building a synthesizer, I know. Can I do a PhD on building a synthesizer? And he said, nah, He said, we know how to build a synthesizer. It’s a digital synthesizer with digital circuits. We know what to do. He said, but we don’t know how to program it to trick the ear. Like we can only make the pitch go in jumps and how small do those jumps have to be before the ear will hear it like a continuous glide? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So pitch, loudness, number of harmonics, things like that. He actually didn’t know there was a big field called psychoacoustics that had been around for the last 50 years because he was an electrical engineer like me. So I started, I started reading and I must say I chose him because I chose the project because of the project, not because of the lecturer. I’d actually had that guy, his name was Harvey Holmes, as a lecturer and I really didn’t like him in the undergraduate years, but I thought, eh, the project’s interesting. Well, man was I wrong. He was a great guy. He was a really good mentor to me. And one lesson I learned from that was not to trust my first, my first impressions of what people are like which, which has stood me in good stead over the, over the years. So anyway, I pursued this this research into psychoacoustics, very quickly found out it was a big field and that I knew nothing. So I just read and read and read and learned as much as I could. I also got distracted with interesting little projects associated with the synthesizer. And the whole thing took me, I’m embarrassed to say, 6 and a half years. My scholarship ran out. I had to work as a tutor to, you know, to survive. And yeah, it took a long time, but I learned a lot. I didn’t, I didn’t prove anything of any value to the world, but I learned a lot of stuff that proved to be valuable to me over time.

Wow. And so now, now we’re going to come to not only the first job, but almost a lifetime kind of a job for you, Harvey. And the first job, and my understanding is, you know, some of our discussions is they didn’t know what to do with a psychoacoustic electrical engineer wanting to work with hearing. What do they have to do with this guy, right?

Well, they didn’t know about me and I knew about them because one of the little things I distracted myself with during the 6 and a half years of the PhD was I was starting to get interested in playing music myself. I pulled out my childhood recorder, you know, the descant recorder, and I thought it’s pretty high and squeaky. So I, I’d heard of NAL and I went there and one of them gave me a hearing aid microphone. I embedded the microphone inside the recorder, put some push buttons on the bottom, and I ended up with a recorder that could play 2 or 3 octaves lower electronically with a fuzz box and a volume control. And so I knew about NAL, I knew that it existed and that was it. So I went along to the, or wrote a letter I suppose, to the director of NAL and said, I know a little bit about hearing and electrical engineering. Could I get a job with you? So he got me in and he brought in two of his senior researchers, Dennis Byrne and Norm Carter, and they both described their research area to me. And I thought Norm sounded like a really interesting guy, but he was looking at how to prevent hearing loss and it didn’t really resonate with me. Dennis, I thought, was a, oh, I don’t know, a sort of slow and not very inspiring, but he was doing hearing aid research and I thought, that sounds great. I could do that. And I remembered my first lesson in judging people. Of course, Dennis was nothing like that. Dennis was fantastic. And so I picked the topic despite the person and I went to work for Dennis basically in his hearing aid research section. And he proved very influential to me, a great mentor. The number one lesson I can remember is he said, don’t measure anything unless you know what you’re going to do with the result. And he was very keen to make clinical encounters with patients efficient. He started life as a, as a psychologist, became an audiology clinician, and then of course moved into research. So he had a very practical focus on life.

Well, it’s too bad we can’t do a Giants episode on Dennis anymore, but because he’s, he’s here, he’s big here in the US also. But I understand that the first project that you did, you took your old Erector set. I think it’s called a Meccano set or something in Australia. Yeah, that’s what I remember. And so seems like kind of a simple way to put together a research project.

Yeah, Dennis and Gary Walker working with him at the time were wondering about sound field testing, about how to test the aided threshold of somebody who’d just been fitted with hearing aids and they were contemplating using pure tones. And they’d done a couple of measurements and it looked like you could use pure tones to do it. And I thought that doesn’t resonate with what I know about acoustics. I think they were just lucky. So I made a little trolley, mounted a B&K microphone on the trolley and used Meccano set to, the trolley was made out of Meccano and used it to go across the room on an aluminium track. And then continuously recorded the sound pressure level as it was going, and then would move the track a few inches to the left or the right. And so I could build up a picture of how the sound pressure level varied across the room. And sure enough, there were huge peaks and valleys, which if you used a pure tone, but when you replaced it with a warble tone sufficiently wide, the whole thing got smoothed out and it was a much more reliable stimulus. So it was, it was kind of fun using that. Using that childhood stuff to build some apparatus. Yeah.

And some of the highlights of your time at this point in the career were some lifetime friendships that I think you made as well coming to the US and studying for a time with some individuals.

Yeah, that was a few years in, but by that stage, I’d already decided my future. I mean, I only went to NAL because I figured I’d been at a university by then for 10 and a half years and I thought, I’ve got to get a job in the real world somewhere before going back to a uni for my career. But I’d only been at NAL for, I think about 1 year and I thought, this is it, this is great. Someone said to me, people can be so influential. Someone said, you’re going to be the director of this place one day. And I thought, oh, that sounds like it could be an achievable goal, you know, 20, 30, or 40 years later. And I loved it. It was the whole organization was focused on delivering services to people and doing it in a research evidence-based way. And I thought it was a great place to work. So I threw myself into it and I, yeah, a couple of people there, I think recognized I had some potential and the chief audiologist set up a deal where I would go to New York with Harry Levitt. That’s Laurie Uphold was the chief audiologist. I’m very grateful to him. And I spent 3 monks working with Harry Levitt and as it turned out with Arthur Boothroyd also in America, in New York, just collaborating on research with them. Also got to be good friends with Don Dirks and that survived a long time still. Yeah, it was a very, very useful time.

Well, and some of our younger people might not realize that Harry Levitt is one of the instigators of digital hearing aids. And Arthur was huge in the area of hearing and hearing rehabilitation and those kinds of things as well. And so that had to be a very nice friendship that lasted for those guys for quite a long time.

Yeah, I don’t think this is the reason we were friends, but while I was putting these things together, reflected on the fact that Harry actually started life as an electrical engineer and Arthur as a physicist.

Oh, okay. So that helped a lot.

People have come to audiology from lots of different places, really. Yeah.

But you guys could talk and spend a long time drinking beers without having to, without anybody really knowing what you were talking about.

Yeah, that’s not a good thing, is it?

Yeah. So there was some lowlight, just one lowlight, I think, during this particular time at NAL.

Yeah, I probably got a bit too big for my britches, I think they, about 4 or 5 years in, they gave me a job of, took me away from Dennis’s section and asked me to prepare specifications for the next family of hearing aids. NAL was at that time the big organization, had clinics across Australia, had the research organization in Sydney, and we would make our own, we were also a hearing aid manufacturer. We made our own hearing aids in Australia. And so we had an engineering section and an audiology section. And my job was to kind of bridge the two a little bit and make up the specifications for what the next family of hearing aids would be. And, and everybody was kind of deferring to me about what should happen. And Dennis got a bit annoyed and I probably got too big for my britches. So that was another little lesson in life about giving people the recognition that they, that they deserve. Yeah.

Well, we all have those lessons that we’re learning and and we’re going to find out what yours were as we move through this whole thing, I’m sure. So now was that the, that being the acting engineer manager position?

Yeah, that they put the chief engineer at the time left and went to work for Phonak and they needed a new chief engineer for a short term. I didn’t want to do it long term because it was pretty much straight engineering, but they put me in charge and gave me the bad news that although we were going to keep designing hearing aids and, and organizing to get the manufactured. We weren’t going to do all the quality control and nitty bitty things ourselves that was being contracted out. And my job was to get rid of half the engineering staff. So that was, that was a great, it’s like a really fun development management career. Yeah.

That’s another lesson, right?

That’s right. But that, that transitioned into something that was much more much more attractive to me in a couple of ways. They created a new section. Called Development. Remember I said the organization was split down the middle, it had Engineering and it had Audiology. In fact, when they gave me the first job, they made me a physicist rather than an engineer because otherwise the Engineering group might have said they should boss me around instead of the audiologists, and they wanted to be the ones who bossed me around. So anyway, they created this Development section and it was a lovely merging of Engineering and Audiology in the one section. With people who were meant to do a little bit of both. And the absolute highlight of that period, it’s about a 4-year or 2 or 3-year period, was that I met my gorgeous wife. She was working for the organization in another state entirely, Tasmania, and I met her through an educational process that was going on there at the time.

And there were some lowlights at that time as well though.

Yeah, yeah. The development section had the job, excuse me, of designing hearing aids for the organization. And we did, we designed a family of hearing aids, but it just was not getting economical. We were making about 100,000 hearing aids per year for the organization as a whole. But by that stage, the few big companies in the world were making a million hearing aids a year and things were just changing from analog to digital. And the companies, the big companies were getting their own specific integrated circuits just for hearing aids. Whereas we didn’t have the economy of scale to do that. We were stuck with generic analog or digital devices. And I figured, or everyone figured, we couldn’t compete. So very sadly, although we’d been designing, manufacturing these hearing aids since the Second World War, not me personally, but the organization. It was time to stop. And so instead I had the job of organizing a tender to purchase in hearing aids, which eventually Bernafon won the tender.

Yeah, that’s when we have come across each other a few times, what, Bern and a few other places over the years. But later on you became like the senior research scientist at NAL as well.

Yeah, that was running the, running the hearing aid research section. Dennis was then the overall director of research, and I ran one of the 3 or 4 groups within that. It was, it was very satisfying. The organization, the larger organization was still fitting hearing aids to people across Australia with growing numbers of clinics, sort of merging up from 40-odd up to 100 or so clinics across Australia. And everybody wanted it all to run efficiently. And that’s where research comes in. What can we do to get the best possible outcomes in the shortest possible time? So our work was valued. A new government funding scheme came along. They were encouraging organizations that had something in common to get together, and the government would then throw in more money to make the whole thing work better. So we, we got a grant. I helped get the grant for the that formed the Cooperative Research Centre for Cochlear Implants and Hearing Aids. So we’re now working with Cochlear and with Graeme Clark in Melbourne and Bob Cowan in Melbourne. So it was a real merging of a couple of different powerhouses of of activity. So that was pretty exciting. I, I during that time I did get back to uni. The the local uni was wanting somebody to give lectures in psychoacoustics, which I happened to know about. So I, so I started giving just, just 2 hours a week casual lecturing firstly on psychoacoustics and later they asked me to lecture on hearing aids. So I did that. And it helped. I had a young, or we had a young family by that stage and kind of living from pay week to pay week. So the extra little money was helpful. And some years in, the university went through a catastrophe and needed to cut all its casual staff. So I got the rocket from there and I thought, oh, how can I supplement the income? Well, I discovered that there literally wasn’t a good textbook on hearing aids and I’d been preparing the notes to use with my classes. So I thought, oh well, I’ll turn this into a textbook. So I spent 3 years just in home time at nights after the kids went to bed and weekends writing what became the first edition of Hearing Aids. I was enjoying my family, but gee, I’ve got objective scientific evidence that I was an absent father. When your children are born in Australia, you get given something called the Blue Book. And amongst stuff on vaccination and other handy hints, it has these growth charts which shows the you can plot your child’s height and weight and head circumference and see what percentile they’re on. And being a scientist, I of course measured my kids regularly. So you can see these growth charts that go boom, boom, boom, boom with points all along following the percentiles. And then there’s a 3-year gap where for both children, there’s no measurements in those 3 years. So I by coincidence, it was the 3 years where I was writing the textbook. So. Yeah, I think I didn’t live up to my family responsibilities very well during that time.

I think any author, Harvey, goes through that same kind of a thing. Now, I do happen to have the second edition out here. The first edition’s back in a box someplace because I know you update everything in the first edition anyway. So, no, but anybody who’s written a book or updated one or whatever, there’s always a gap in their life for a period of time. So, You can’t feel guilty about that because that makes you cool so you get better jobs and whatever else knows that happens. Well, now, let’s see, around 2000, is that when you became the director of NAL from what I get?

Yeah. Dennis unfortunately died. He was 64. He was really looking forward to his retirement, which was going to start in a year’s time. He had interest in fishing, strong interest in fishing and winemaking, and he was so looking forward to it, but he got bowel cancer and died within a space of a few months. So I got the job as his replacement and was there in that job then for the next 17 years. It was very enjoyable. People at NAL were great with each other. We’d often, or not yet regularly, have some visitors from universities from somewhere in the world. And invariably, somewhere, sometime through their month or 3 months or whatever with us, they’d say, this is such a supportive environment that they’re used to universities where people are pretty much individuals, maybe with their own team, but not such collaboration. And whereas people have now really helped each other. There’s a picture I sent you which captures it. My long-term colleague, Sharon Cameron, who started as a PhD student and I gave her a job at NAL, had this amazing Afro hairstyle, huge, and she very generously organized to have it cut off as a fundraising thing for charity. All NAL got together, somebody made up a song about it, and a NAL choir formed to celebrate the occasion, and that’s what that photo was that I sent you.

And it pictures you with a banjo, so you must have been a little bit of a musician in that choir. Yeah, that’s brilliant. I was going to say, Harvey, that’s an Australian term for a bunch of people having a great time doing something that involves music. It isn’t— my thing is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or the Boys Choir in England and some of those kinds of things. This is a little bit different kind of an operation.

Absolutely. It’s just a very informal, friendly Funny things. Yeah. The whole time as research director, I really enjoyed it. I had the chance to basically promote NAL and promote the importance of hearing to the government. So met lots of government ministers and a prime minister during that time to talk about what we did and make sure, but essentially the funding kept coming. And well along the way there, I also made a second edition of the of the Hearing Aid Book. I thought it was going to be a simple matter of just updating a few things, but it ended up twice the size and again took a few years, but not quite such a big hole in my life.

The first one’s about like this and this one’s about like that, so not too bad.

The best thing about it is I had my wife and daughter on the first edition when my daughter was about 8 because I wanted people to know it was about children, and on the second edition, I went back into the archives and I pulled out that picture of my daughter when she was born. And that’s my wife holding her. My excuse for using it is that they’re communicating with each other and they have hearing aids Photoshopped on their heads. But really it was just such a lovely photo and I wanted to stick it on there.

Well, and that probably only made up for a month or so of the 3-year period that it took you to make the whole book, right?

Right.

That’s right. Well, was there some downloading? Well, the parenting probably was the downside of some of that particular period at NAL.

Yeah, not so much. The first book was where I think I was a bit too absent from the family, but at NAL, Most of it was very enjoyable. There was some managerial stuff to do with the board, and if there was a good, a good sort of board chairperson and a good CEO of the organization, it was all plain sailing. But when there was a lack of trust, it got difficult from time to time. So I would just have to divorce that, get through it in the, in the shortest time I could. And so that I have time for being involved in the projects, which is of course what I enjoyed.

Yeah. And but it’s probably also cool to have guaranteed funding for these projects instead of having to write grants all the time and, and, oh gee, this one didn’t get funded and that one didn’t get funded. But, but guaranteed baseline was probably pretty, pretty cool.

Look, I think that was— I think we had two secret weapons. That was one of them, that just guaranteed funding, which meant that although we still could apply for grants to supplement it, we knew that the core people would still be there in 3 years’ time or 5 years’ time or 10 years’ time, and we could plan projects like the LOCIE project, the Longitudinal Project for Children with Hearing Loss. We could plan them to be over a long duration that was needed because we knew the funding would be there to support it. The second secret weapon was that we were part of an organization that valued practical, evidence-based outcomes. And so if we would come up with something that would take a clinician 40 minutes, they say, you’ve got to be joking. We don’t have 40 minutes to spare. Give us something that will achieve it in 4 minutes. And so that practical constraint and having useful things valued by the organization, that was great.

So, and like a lot of us that ended up doing some talks here and there, it looked like you capitalized on on when, because, because I know how I did when somebody wanted me to go someplace, I figured out a way to either use miles or, or some way to get the, get the group there to have a good time.

And absolutely. So if I got an invitation to talk somewhere and it overlapped with the school holidays, man, we’re all there. But we turned everyone we could into family holidays. So that was, that was really enjoyable.

And we got some, some nice shots. One of the ones that, that I thought was so cool. I mean, your family was beautiful here, Harvey, but the one that I loved the most was the Egyptian one where you guys are all decked out in duds and there’s a couple of dogs there and so on. To me, that was interesting, more interesting than anything, but what a beautiful time you guys had kind of traveling around doing those things.

Yeah, mostly it was the whole family, but that particular one was I was invited to give a talk in Egypt and my oldest child was 18 and we thought that we could actually leave her at home for the first time in her life by herself. So it was that case, it was just my wife and I and the cruise we were on up the Nile. Fantastic. Had put on a fancy dress dinner and provided the clothes. So that’s, I think, accounts for that weird looking photo.

That one, that one, I, when I, when that one popped up, I just kind of laughed because that’s It’s just a good one. So what were some of the challenges working at NAL?

Probably the change in ownership or in the structure of the industry in Australia. The government changed in the late ’90s and the new government had a moral philosophy that governments don’t do services. Private organizations do services. And up till then, our organization was taking care of all of the pensioners in Australia as far as their hearing aids were concerned, all the aged pensioners. And what they decided was that it should be open to the private sector. They left our organization to continue doing it, but it was now working in competition with the private sector. That put NAL, which was then just the research part, was then called NAL, in a funny place because we were funded by the government to the benefit of everybody, but we are part of an organization that was competing with the rest of the industry. And so I had to be very, I was given a strong talking to at the time from the departmental chiefs saying, what you have to do is you have to do things for the benefit of the industry, not for the benefit of the organization that’s run by your boss. So that produced a little bit of conflict from time to time into what we did and how we did it.

So that was a, the controversy between NAL and Australian Hearing then.

Exactly right. When I joined the organization, it was all called NAL, but they split it up and they called the clinical part Australian Hearing and the— now it’s Hearing Australia, things don’t change much, and the research part is still NAL. Yep.

Okay. Well, then about 2017, you became a professor of audiology at Manchester.

Yeah, I stepped down as the director and Manchester contacted me. Kevin Munro, who I kind of knew at the time, contacted me and said, would I like a part-time job there? And I thought, fantastic. So that was an annual trip to Manchester. And I really enjoyed it. Kevin is such a lovely person. Kevin, as it turns out, married an audiologist, as I had. They had two boys in their early teens, and we had a young child by then because we previously were short-term foster carers, and one of them we loved so much we decided to keep, and he joined our family. So he was actually that same age, even though our other children were well and truly grown up by then. So we found we had so much in common, and we spent a lot of time with Kevin, Sinead, and family.

Yeah, it looks like you guys, you’re riding around the country on bikes and all kinds of interesting things as well as doing the research and the professorial stuff that you were probably supposed to do.

That’s right. Yeah, we did a bit of work too.

Yeah, a bit of work too. Well, then, and some of the highlights of that you’ve just mentioned as was meeting new people and interacting with them and so on, new students from different places and that kind of thing. But in ’18 you became a professor of audiology at Macquarie probably one of the old hangouts at one time or another back and forth because it’s right there in Sydney.

That’s right. Yeah. So again, that was another 20% position. So both those jobs were essentially one day a week jobs. And it was the one at Macquarie was quite similar to the one in Manchester. It was supervising people doing research. So Master of Audiology, Master of Research, PhDs, and it’s so enjoyable because the people who do that tend to be passionate, smart people, and it’s just a joy working with them. They asked me at one stage to give an address to a graduating ceremony. I think the real speaker had dropped out at short notice, so they wanted a replacement, but I had to think about some lessons in life, and the lesson I came up with actually resonated or went back to when I was writing that first edition of the textbook where I thought I was doing it to get to a place. I thought I was doing it to make some money to help support the family basically, and to produce something which I would be proud of. And when it ended, I thought, oh good, I’ve done it. And then I kind of missed it. So I realized that actually the process of doing something can be enjoyable in and of itself, not just the result you end up with. So that was the theme of my theme of my talk to the kids was enjoy what you’re doing, make the most of it now. Don’t just think of it as something that you’re preparing for the future, even though you may well be doing that too. Follow your interests. You never know when your interests are going to lead you to something good.

Well, and on top of that, you better enjoy what you’re doing when you’re doing a book like that, because you’re not going to make too much cash when you’re selling the books. I don’t know about yours, but most of us haven’t made a million bucks doing our book sales. So now, one of the famous things that you have created with colleagues, of course, is the COSI. And so can you tell us a little bit about the development of the COSI? And I mean, now I think there’s even a COSI 2.0. Available somewhere else as well.

So, well, it was the late 19— very late 1980s, and the Australian government was valuing the measurement of outcomes rather than the measurement of process. In other words, instead of counting how many people you’ve fitted hearing aids to and things like that, you’d measure what a difference it’s made to the people, something, an out— a real outcome of the research. And so we became— I became aware of something called goal attainment scaling. Perhaps from psychology, I’m not sure where it came from, where you would talk to the person you’re about to try and help and you’d say, well, what are your problems? What would you like to achieve? And what would be a measure of success for you? How good a result do you want or do you need? And so we tried to implement that across the hearing centers. We got a group of clinicians in and they tried it and they invariably reported back that when they got to the bit of Well, how good do you think it can be? The client would say back to the audiologist, well, you’re the audiologist, you tell me how well is this going to work? And it was a bit unrealistic to ask them to set an actual sort of quantitative goal for how much help they’re going to get. And so we thought, all right, well, that bit just doesn’t fit. But the idea of asking them what their individual problems are, and then at the end asking them, how much has this helped you? That one seemed to make sense. So we call that the client-oriented scale of improvement. And look, in essence, it’s a blank sheet of paper where you write down what the client’s problems are, and at the end you write down how much they think it’s helped them. It worked so well because it was done with a group of clinicians who could get really involved in the process, give good feedback. So perhaps it’s an early example of co-design by researchers. My wife, who was an audiologist at the time, scoffed that here I was, an electrical engineer, inventing blank sheets of paper for clinicians to use, but it has caught in, you’re right. The new, the new now, not the new now, now since I’ve left it, I think has introduced some AI into the process, which has become COSI 2.0, but actually I can’t tell you any more about it than that.

But you know, this became not only used in Australia everywhere, but certainly in Europe and the US and many other places around the world. And so, and we used to talk about it in some of our talks when we would go out on the stump for Bernafon somewhere as well. But in addition to all the books and the COSI and some of the other research projects as well as the 300+ publications that you have, Harvey. You also have a lot of patents too from what I understand. Yeah. The patents are special kinds of things that hopefully they’ve done well for you with the patents.

Some have. Patenting is a very expensive and very time-consuming process. And so you don’t, you don’t engage in it lightly. My reason for doing it, the patents have never been owned by me. They’ve always been owned by, well, the Australian government effectively, because that’s who owns now. But the reason you do it is if you have an idea which can only be brought to fruition by a company that has to invest lots of money in it, and why would they invest money in developing it further unless they can get a good return from it, and therefore they need the protection. So we’ve taken out a patent in cases where we can see the possibility, or in fact the likelihood in our judgment, of a company wanting to take it further. And a few of them have produced a good flow of royalties. The one on the trainable aid did, and that was where the hearing aid learns what the client wants in particular situations, different situations, and automatically changes itself to match what the client has previously told it would be good there. One on acoustic shock protection. There was a spate of injuries across Australia in call centres where for whatever reason, unexpected high-pitched squeals would come through the telephone system. And so we invented a way that would detect that and within a few milliseconds of them starting, put in a notch filter and get rid of it and protect people’s hearing in that way. Some other things we haven’t protected with patents, like the work we’re currently doing on the auditory processing disorders and its various other causes of listening difficulties. It hasn’t lent itself to patents, but we’ve been managing to commercialize that anyway. But we’ll come back to that at the end, I think.

Sure. So now, and I know you’ve had, you hold 13 or so major awards from all over the world. And all of these are really important, but I know you have a couple of those that are really special for you. And can we talk about those just a little bit?

Yeah, well, the first one wasn’t really even an award, but about I don’t know, it must be nearly 30 years ago, I was elected as Vice President of the Audiology Society of Australia. And that gave me such a buzz because I knew better than anyone I was not an audiologist. So getting that acceptance from my, the people I was working with and people around Australia, that, that actually meant a lot to me. The one from the International, from the American Auditory Society, that was involved me giving a, at the Carhartt Memorial talk in 2018. And by that stage, I’d, I’d left NAL. I decided that what I wanted to focus on in any remaining work time I had was this auditory processing disorder problem, which, as you said, needs a lot of evidence, basically. It needs a lot of good research. And I thought, okay, well, let’s take the bullet and talk on that topic rather than stuff from the past. At that. So I had to really gather my thoughts together for that. So the award provoked me into trying to be consistent with and coherent with what I was trying to work on in that field, unlike what I’m saying now. The other one, of course, the Order of Australia was a pretty good award and my whole family could be there as I got the award from the Governor General. It was very nice. So I appreciated that. Look, I appreciate it, but yeah, that is special. That’s right.

But you also have been awarded a research achievement award from the American Academy of Audiology, as well as an international award from the American Academy. And the International Society of Audiology has presented the – Award as well. And we could probably go through all 13 of these, but we’d probably be here half the day too. I might just say that you had the Callier Prize from the University of Texas with, I see the shot here is an old friend, Ross Roeser, that presented that to you at that time. And so in addition to the honors, when I looked at your CV the first time, there was a whole list of journals from all around the world. So what are some of the trials and tribulations of being a journal editor for everybody around the world in our profession here?

Look, I’m embarrassed and ashamed to say that I’ve never been a journal editor. I’ve reviewed for, I think, every journal that exists, even remotely connected, I feel. But I take my hat off to the people who do the extra step of being a journal editor. I imagine it’s a lot of hard work and I’ve never been game to take it on. But the reviewing, I take that pretty seriously. I try to do each one thoroughly. They take me a long time. I’m pretty bad at doing them on time, but I do do them very thoroughly and I try to be as helpful as I can to the people who put their, poured their lives into writing the articles in the first place. Yeah, it’s—

Well, so that, so we have to caution our colleagues around the world that Harvey might be reading your paper very thoroughly and making recommendations back to the editor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That’s right.

So another thing that I like to ask during these sessions, Harvey, is what’s the coolest audiology moment or psychoacoustic or electrical engineering, I guess, moment or moments to date?

Well, I’m getting further and further from electrical engineering, I can tell you. But the coolest moment is actually right now. I’m pleased to say. So the LiSN-S test was the first test that Sharon Cameron and I brought out way back in 2007 now, which is, it basically let clinicians detect a condition that people didn’t know existed till then, which was a deficit in the ability to use spatial release from masking, or in other words, a deficit in the ability to focus from sounds in frontal direction and suppress sounds coming from other ways. And it turned out that Lots of people who have a lot of middle ear infections in the first 5 years of life end up with that as a consequence of that disturbed binaural functioning during their early life. But the great news is they can learn it. They can be given auditory training, spatialized auditory training, which lets them pick up those skills just as if they hadn’t had the otitis media in the first place. So that was a good start, but that’s this much of the problem of listening difficulties, which is, which is huge. And listening difficulties can come from that type of auditory processing disorder or several other types of auditory processing disorders or a memory problem or a language problem or an attention problem or a, or any of those acting with each other and any of those can cause problems in the other. So it’s a really complicated field, which is why I’ve thrown myself into it. Why it’s exciting is that as we bring out each new test focusing on just one of those aspects, It’s being commercialized through a company called Sound Scouts. They put it up on a portal, clinicians subscribe to use it, and they use those tests. They get nice, generate automatically generated reports, but the de-identified data is left behind on the server. And because I’m associated with the company, I can go in and I can download that de-identified data and then start to look at the relationships between the different abilities. So the more tests we put up that are useful to clinicians and clinicians use them, and they are in multiple countries around the world. Then the more data that’s existing there. I feel like I’m not now in collaboration with clinicians working for Australian Hearing across Australia. I feel like I’m in collaboration with clinicians around the world who are engaging in this really difficult area of auditory processing disorders and other causes of listening difficulty. So I’m absolutely, I’m really only working one day a week or paid one day a week, but ask my wife, I think I’m working six days a week throwing myself into this to try and end up with a very cohesive set of tests and remediation strategies to deal with these problems.

You know, and that’s always been one of our big criticisms in audiology is we always have very small samples and it’s hard to draw many conclusions from some of the small samples that we have to look at things. And so having that kind of a sample for those data is very, very special indeed.

But when I downloaded the data just a couple of weeks ago, the number of LiSN-S cases in the database was 7,800 or something like that. Oh, cool. That’s right. And the longer the other tests are up there, those numbers are growing very nicely as well.

So now that we know that the coolest moment for you in audiology is now, what do you think the future of audiology is going to be? And I know you’re Crystal ball, you say, is broken, but let’s get Harvey Dillon’s opinion of what may be the future of our profession.

I can’t do it, Bob.

Oh, you can’t do that? Okay.

My crystal ball is broken.

Yeah.

I’m just going to do my bit that I can in this challenging area of the auditory processing and its friends problem. And I hope that what we’ll be able to give there is actually some real-time guidance for clinicians as they’re going through doing the tests, that the system will be able to use its knowledge of what’s happened before to make suggestions about what the next test should be, what the possible interpretations are, what the most likely to be successful remediations are. That’s, I think that’ll be, that’ll be a pretty cool thing for the future.

It’d be very cool. And I think as we, as we learn from some of the studies you’re doing, some of the other studies that are going on around the world, where we have a way in which we can do much more for people, say, with normal audiograms supposedly, but really still have problems. And I can’t tell you the number of people that I saw in the clinic that I told had normal hearing when, gee, you know, just talk to your wife a little bit. There’ll be a— we can probably fix that somehow. And as it turns out, They likely had high-frequency losses. They had this and that and CAPD problems and those other things that we didn’t know much about at the time. And it looks to me like family’s been a great part of your not only professional life, but general life as well. And so we have a couple of shots coming up. The one that I like the most is is you in the pool with a glass of wine. That’s that kind of says it about Australia for me. It really does.

Yeah, we, we got a pool. I’m looking at it here through the window in, in the backyard. And the kids have spent a lot of time in it and as have I. But the family has been the center of my life. It’s where all the joy has come from and, and still is. We got grandkids. One of our, our daughter has got two children of her own. So we’re now in the, in the grandchild phase as well. It’s fantastic. Yeah.

Great. Well, as we wrap up our session here, Harvey, can you tell us a little bit about this upcoming SoundExchange 26 that’s going to be at, actually, from the 11th to the 13th of May in Sydney? Yeah.

So every 2 years, Audiology Australia runs a workshop program for clinicians. And they asked would I run one in pediatrics and I said, no, I don’t know enough about pediatrics. And they said, well, we really want to know about auditory processing in pediatrics.

That’s different.

So I was happy to take that on and immediately enlisted 2 clinicians. I’ll give you an insight here. Hearing aids, obviously my textbook’s been used around the world, hearing aids. I fitted 5 hearing aids in my life and they were supervised by my wife when I was courting her. And I was visiting her in Tasmania and I had holidays and she didn’t. But I’ve been surrounded by clinicians all that time who lived and breathed hearing aids. So I’ve always tried to listen to clinicians and I’ve tried to then use what clinicians say to evaluate the research evidence and to use the research evidence to evaluate what the clinicians are saying. And so that’s been my strength. And I’ve tried to do that in this workshop. I don’t see people with auditory processing disorders, but clinicians do. And so I’ve been put in, brought in a couple who I really respect from the University of Melbourne, and they’re going to help me run this 2-day workshop on dealing with auditory processing disorders.

And one of the, one of the upcoming sessions that you and I are going to do is all about your current work and the kinds of things that are going on now that the coolest moment in audiology is now. And so we’ll have our listeners watch out for that because I suspect that will be a very informative session for them. And so as we— since we have kind of gone through your whole world here, Harvey, it’s my pleasure to say it’s been my honor to work with Dr. Harvey Dillon in the presentation of his career and the journey of getting to be one of the world’s individuals in hearing. Beginning with virtually when nobody knew what to do with you as a psychoacoustic engineer to a student and an early professional, but to a brilliant, successful career of continuous outstanding contributions into the field of audiology. And, you know, Often we get so worked into our own areas. People from the outside that look at our profession on the inside are those that really make some huge strides in knowledge that we have. And thank you very much for all of the contributions that you have made in that regard to our profession. So, Dr. Harvey Dillon, A true giant in audiology. And to those of you that are out there, thank you for tuning in to This Week in Hearing and this episode of Giants in Audiology. But be with me next time when we get to know another giant in audiology.