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Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

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Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#51

Post by EB66 »

caeril wrote: post #9

Objectively, my hearing is just fine. I can hear frequency sweeps and tones perfectly well, but all my life I've been unable to pick out words in conversation if there's even moderate background noise. "What?" is likely my most commonly uttered phrase. This leads to people constantly telling me to get my "hearing checked", when it's not the ability to hear tones that's the problem. Rather irritating explaining this t…

I have the same problem. A lot of people do. For me, it developed during my 20s. My mother is a speech language pathologist so the problem was identified early.

What you have is a hearing discrimination loss. It's often caused by diminished hearing of higher frequencies. Hearing aids can help or if the loss of higher frequencies is total, then frequency-transposition hearing aids may be needed. Learning to lip read can also help a lot too.

Other people without hearing discrimination loss have probably experienced what it's like if they've ever listened to a cheap TV with crummy internal speakers and had to turn on subtitles. Very high frequencies on cheap speakers are often diminished or distorted. That makes it much more difficult to discriminate spoken words even though you can hear them fine.

If you haven't done so already, go get your hearing tested by a quality audiologist (there is such a thing as a bad audiologist). It can help identify exactly what's going on and give you a good baseline to compare against tests in the future (these things often get worse with age).

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#52

Post by rhubarbcustard »

fallingfrog wrote: post #4

I’m surprised that 30 decibels is considered mild hearing loss. Every 6 decibels is roughly a halving of sound pressure so if you have 30 decibels of loss you’re hearing 1/32 of the sound that a person without any hearing loss would hear. That’s not mild! This is a very cool project, I wonder if modern hearing aids work in a similar way- by tuning their response to the person wearing them?

Hearing aids have been doing this for 20+ years. The big players in the market have been fine-tuning their algorithms and hardware for a long time to be able to fit even severe hearing losses with a good sound. Modern aids also very impressive with sound localisation and context-switching between people speaking in groups.

Edit: That's not to say this isn't a cool project, it is VERY cool.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#53

Post by mrspeaker »

pkaye wrote: post #49
phaedrus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same issue. Worse, when I did get my hearing checked, the supposed test for difficulty picking up speech against background noise was terribly and obviously flawed. They used a very short (few seconds) clip that looped. My brain quickly learned the loop and subtracted it. What I can't do is filter out unpredictable background noise. Plus the lab is an idealized environment without distractions. Want to acc…

Have you done hearing testing? How well did you do on the word recognition tests?

I was wondering the same - I was a concert once, and was putting in earplugs - when I noticed one ear wasn't affected as much as the other when I put the earplugs in.

Testing showed I had some hearing loss - but not a lot. I ended up getting more tests. They played a series of words into my "good" ear and I had to repeat them: "duck"... "duck". "concrete" .... "concrete"... it was pretty funny.

Then they did the same thing in my other ear: "schmwaaa" ... "Smchmwaa?"... "Grunnnngch"... "wtf?!". Turned out I had an accoustic neuroma - a tumor on the auditory nerve. Got it cut out with some neurosurgery, but now am 100% deaf in one ear with shitty tinnitus.

Hearing loss is pretty common so I don't want to scare-monger - but, OP - follow up on the tests!

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#56

Post by CurtHagenlocher »

It's awesome how easy this kind of experimentation is today. Thirty years ago, I worked with a mathematician at JPL who used fairly specialized equipment to find a frequency notch where he had lost his hearing -- at roughly 8k, IIRC, in addition to his total inability to hear anything over ~12k. (The latter was probably just normal age-related high-frequency hearing loss). In those days, an accurate signal generator was an expensive piece of lab equipment... .

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#57

Post by mixmastamyk »

herodotus wrote: post #5

I have age-related hearing loss: bass frequencies are ok, but high frequencies drop off. When I first got hearing aids, I thought that what they did was boost the frequencies as necessary as (I think) described by this author. But hearing is not a linear system. The hearing aids do boost the frequencies where I am deficient, but by an amount much smaller than the difference between my audiogram and normal. I think th…

Check for ear wax, once I got it cleaned out and was like the treble knob of the world went from -2 to +2.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#58

Post by randomdata »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #25
phaedrus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same issue. Worse, when I did get my hearing checked, the supposed test for difficulty picking up speech against background noise was terribly and obviously flawed. They used a very short (few seconds) clip that looped. My brain quickly learned the loop and subtracted it. What I can't do is filter out unpredictable background noise. Plus the lab is an idealized environment without distractions. Want to acc…

I hope you'll get your diagnosis eventually. > It also makes relationships difficult; I've been married four years and my wife is only now starting to actually understand and believe me when I say I didn't hear what she said (vs just not caring / not listening). I feel for you. This reminded me of my recent discovery. You've probably seen this[0] image test circulating on social media the other day. Few days ago, whe…

> As it turns out, she truly can visualize everything in her head.

Here I would have told you that I can visualize everything in my head... until I took the test – definite 1. I can visualize everything in some loose sense, but it is encoded differently. Like, to use a poor analogy, a computer can represent an image as binary digits. I can understand 6 in my mind. Perhaps I took the test too literally?

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#59

Post by TheRealPomax »

The thing I hate is that the tests stop at a stupidly low frequency. I don't care if I still have good hearing at 8khz, my left ear hears up to 16k, and my right ear barely registers at 10, yet no is not testing for you if you're a musician. And ever had an ENT condescendingly tell you "you can still hear about the same as a normal person, what's the problem?" while smugly writing you a free hearing test?

And no one's going to actually figure out treatment, because there's no money in it.

Re: Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

#60

Post by Seanambers »

I must say - After having Lasik done to my eyes and then not beeing happy with the results. I am quite amazed that there is so little real research going on with regards to senses everyone needs to function in society. Hearing, seeing, feeling.

I saw a documentary about the boston bombers, and a lot of the survivors lost their legs or had their legs maimed. One of the survivors had a leg that was basically an attempted save and she elected to amputate it,she said that what she would miss the most was feeling her toes in the sand. Now even the though the thought of that had never crossed my mind before, I could immediately correlate that feeling with my own sense of loss wrt. my vision.

The older I get the more dismayed i get with the medical community / industry. There's so much pain in the world, and it seems like the people most competent with the issues, are more occupied by nonsense. In almost all other professional trades, people willingly give their time and energy to solve problems. But when it comes to the most important machine as in - ourselves it's all for the money.

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