151–158 of 158 posts
This is nifty. My father has hearing loss and it's bad enough that not only does he use hearing aids, he is constantly turning them up until they feedback and start ringing. He doesn't hear the ringing, but I do, and I have some hearing damage of my own. And he wonders why his hearing aids go through batteries so fast. Their description of how hearing loss works gives me some ideas on how I can help my father manage…
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I thought the bear picture was maybe the best part of the article. Compression is tricky, multiband even more so, and the type of multiband compression they're using is even harder to wrap your head around (there are two ways (that I know of) to do what they're doing but I doubt they want to talk about which one they use.) It's a great layman's explanation, but if you have a better one I'd love to see it.
I think the point of the bear picture isn't that you can't see half the bear, but rather that (to continue the visual analogy) you can't see half of the bear's colors. How do you fix something that you can't perceive? You can change the missing colors to something that you can see, but you end up distorting the original image. In the soundcloud samples, if I can't hear anything above a certain frequency, making them…
So if you picture a scale next to the bear picture from 1-100, then the bottom part of the bear is what's beneath the (effective) noise floor for that frequency. To extend the analogy to multiband compression you'd have maybe 10 bears next to each other, each missing different amounts and each needing a slightly different smashing to lift the bottom of the picture into the visible range.
edit: I think people are assuming that the frequency content of the bear picture corresponds to the frequency content of sound (they're all signals, right?) but to me it's a much more basic analogy. To do it that way you'd have to be turning up the soft reds or something to that effect, but rods and cones being what they are we don't lose vision in a comparable way to how we lose hearing so I don't think there's a good, intuitive visual analog in that sense.
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You're right, they're still fairly subtle and probably not the first thing someone would notice about me, but if I turn my head slightly, you're bound to notice my ear moulds/tube.
True, I do wear glasses as well, so they kind of blend into that as well.
This is especially true of modern "Receiver In The Ear" (RITE) models where instead of a tube carrying sound, you have a very thin wire going into your ear canal.
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It seems to me that a simple way to eliminate the feedback issue is to separate the microphone from the speaker. Hearing loss runs in my family, so I've watched my relatives struggle with hearing aids, and I've decided that when it's time for me: 1) I will build it myself and figure out the details, to hell with the audiologists and their racket. 2. I will carry the microphone and amplifier in my shirt pocket. No mor…
I'm not a hearing aid expert but the microphone and earpiece may currently be tightly coupled because it has to be. That is, human ears are very sensitive to phase shifts and time delays. Placing the microphone in a location that is not your ear may throw off your hearing somewhat (possibly ability to locate from where a sound originated).
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That's very good reasoning. If a person with visual impairment walks around with a white stick, it's obvious and people normally cater for their needs. It shouldn't be any different with hearing. What a good point. I have an elderly friend who has suffered complete hearing loss in one ear after an infection and the other ear can only detect very very low frequencies, and he's constantly saying "PARDON?". It must be v…
> I wonder if they could put a pitch-shifting circuit in his hearing aid to shift sounds up/down so that they fall within his hearing range, whilst not shifting frequencies already in that range. That would help significantly, surely? If you read the article, you'll see that's more or less what most modern hearing aids do, via a technique called multi-band compression. Edit: Actually, here anigbrowl, an audio enginee…
There is no pitch shifting in multiband compression - pitch shifting involves moving the frequency up or down by a number of cents, semitones, octaves etc. It's the effect used to get the "chipmonk" voice (high-pitch and squeaky) where a normal voice is fed into a pitch shifter and it is shifted up or down. It is also how harmonisers work, where they work out the frequency you're singing at and shift it up 7 notes (or an arbitrary amount) so you can sing and get a harmony of yourself.
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All research I've seen finds that talking while driving, even if it's just to a passenger increases accidents by a large amount. Other studies show that people tend to vastly overestimate their multitasking abilities. So in short: very few people can actually talk safely while driving, and the people that think they can probably can't.
Most interestingly, it seems that people who think they're good multi-taskers are actually the worst at it[1]. They are more likely to be impulsive and more likely to indulge in risk-taking. 1: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/01/24/170160105/if-you-...
My mother as a teenager listened to her transistor radio all the time, it was a new thing when she was young. She held it up to her ear and it was turned up very loud now she suffers from fairly profound hearing loss but only in a specific high range she can hear low bass normally. If you talk to her and then turn on a tap to get a glass of water the conversation over, the fridge motor comes on conversation over, any…
"very draining to everyone" hahaha that's made me chuckle. Thanks! I think you're right about "it's like you said the most obnoxious thing ever" hahaha Is there a way of highlighting how often she says "what?" like a tally chart? I would try that with my mum to get a message across. She'd likely be deeply offended, but I think the message would get across.
It's probably partly due to hearing loss and also just habit because I know I will say something like "Are you going to go for your walk now or later?" she says "What?" and I repeat "Are you go.." and she interrupts as if she knew all along what I had said ugh! Although context helps many situations.
I also find she mistakenly interrupts current conversations between people if they are discussing something she interrupts the conversation with a new conversation since she can't hear. She also has a hard time with conversation flow as if on a phone conference call when everyone interrupts each other due to not being able to follow the flow of the conversation.