Synchronising Sound and Stroke with Simon Nunayon

By Mark Taylor

When you take time to consider some of the cliches associated with rowing, a lot of them have audio connotations.

Finding the right note, getting a tune out of the boat, finding a rhythm and even hearing the boat sing – which is also the name of a popular rowing blog – they are terms which we all take for granted.

“I’ve been a musician longer than I’ve been a rower, and I’ve been a rower for a long time!” says Simon Nunayon as we chat in the Captain’s Room at Cambridge’s Goldie Boathouse. The music discussion is not some random tangent, although it may appear so in the context of the Boat Race; it is actually one of the major reasons that Nunayon is trialling at CUBC.

“I’ve always found it fascinating with the differences between the ways people can hear sound,” explains the 23-year-old. “I did my undergrad degree in electrical engineering, and that was born out of a desire to try to create cool audio-related things. I was really into signal processing, but as I went through my undergrad I struggled sometimes with how removed it was from reality.”

Rather than working in consumer audio, where improvements to change the way people perceive sound can be hard to develop, especially for someone who is hearing impaired, Nunayon wanted to see how he could use his skills and knowledge differently. His hope is to help someone who is hearing impaired to boost their standard of hearing, to make it easier to follow speech and conversations.

Nunayon’s interest in sound and audio stems from taking up the piano at the age of 5. He branched out into drums and then taught himself how to play bass and guitar, which led to appearing in orchestras, jazz bands, concert bands, and doing indie and pop covers.

During Covid, when people were confined to their houses, Nunayon seized the opportunity to write an album called Pinwheels and Perambulations, the name based on the idea of spinning around an idea over and over again. The album is available on Spotify.

“Music is a pretty strong motivation for my studies,” he says.

“Musicians are a population who once they get hearing impaired because of the loud music and loudspeakers they’re exposed to for a lot of their professional lives, something is taken away from them, I think. There is also that side of being hearing impaired where you actually embrace it. But I think for those who are hoping to restore some hearing with a device, it would be really cool to just get them closer. They have spent decades training their ears, so to lose it to something like hearing loss is a really big shame.”

That motivation led him to Emmanuel College, where he is doing an MPhil in medical sciences in the Clinical Neurosciences Department. Nunayon works in the SENSE Lab with Professor Manohar Bance, specifically looking at cochlear implants.

A cochlear implant turns a sound into an electrical pulse that directly stimulates a nerve, so the brain gets information as if it has a healthy ear. Over time, severely and profoundly hearing-impaired people can restore not a full healthy sense of hearing, but a much better sense than if they did not have the implant.

“Our lab group looks at ways to make them more successful because the field has sort of stagnated for the last 20 to 30 years,” explains Nunayon, who is on a Paul Williams Scholarship. “My project is quite novel in that rather than just treating the implant like a device that creates impulses, we actually use it in the reverse direction to try to record brainwaves.”

“The most immediate use case for that is if you take an infant who is born deaf, they can’t communicate what they would struggle to hear. What you can do instead is record brain waves generally using electrodes; but this equipment isn’t accessible for all audiologists. If you already have this piece of kit, and implant it inside the infant, you can accurately record the brainwaves through that and improve the outcomes from the implantation.”

“The much longer, future goal is that because you have this really good piece of kit in your ear that means you can monitor how well you are hearing, you can actually get it to adjust the way the implant turns sound into electricity. If you are struggling to hear someone speak, you should be able to seek out, for instance, the settings that make it easier for you to understand what they are saying.”

When Nunayon talked about being a musician longer than being a rower, it is important to note that he has also been in boats for quite a long time.

Having taken up the sport at school, it was new Oxford head coach Mark Fangen-Hall who first explained there was a future in the sport for Nunayon if he worked hard. The words resonated, and he has gone on to represent Great Britain as a junior at the Coupe de la Jeunesse, at the Junior World Championships, and with the under-23 squad.

After rowing at Harvard during his undergraduate degree, Nunayon is now furthering that experience with CUBC.

“I think it has been fantastic,” he says. “Coming from the US where the athletics department just funds everything to a really high standard, I think what we achieve here is pretty phenomenal. I think Rob is great, I think the facilities that we have are what we need. Even if we don’t have all the bells and whistles that you might get across the Pond, the fundamentals are solid, strong and good, and you couldn’t really ask for much more.”

And Nunayon will be hoping that Cambridge can make that all pay dividends and bring all those cliches to reality on April 13.