10 ms·

Experimenting on My Hearing Loss

156 points by paddlesteamer 6y ago

ExcavateGrandMa 6y ago
Do you hear the constant "i"? Why every ppl is ears tested in societies? :D
elektor 6y ago
Now this is a real hacker post! Kudos to the author. I have some mild tinnitus and listen to hours of audiobooks a day. I could see this being a great add-on to apps like Audible or Bound.
fallingfrog 6y ago
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?
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  > I wonder if modern hearing aids work in a similar way- by tuning their response to the person wearing them? I have a basic model provided free by the (UK) NHS. It is tuned to my audiogram by my NHS audiologist. More sophisticated models do a lot of tailoring, both to the person and to the environment. By way of example: https://wdh02.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon-us/main/download-center/opn-s/brochure/16699---15555-10367----2019-opn-s---product-guide.pdf?rev=EAE3&la=en https://wdh02.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon-us/main/download-...
- tgv 6y ago
  "Mild" in contrast to "severe". With a 30dB loss, you can still hear the louder noises, speech, etc. I have a 30dB loss in the mid range in one ear, just where it matters for speech. I can hear and understand people pretty well, but fail when they are whispering, or when they are speaking something else than my native language in a noisy environment. On the positive side: if I sleep on my good ear, a lot of the background noise disappears.
  - fallingfrog 6y ago
    I am 41 and I can still hear tones out to about 17khz. Spent a lot of time in rock shows in my 20’s too. If I knew what I had done right I’d put it in a bottle and sell it. Probably time will catch up to me too in a few years.
- pkaye 6y ago
  I have age related hearing loss with 30db at low frequency and 65db at high frequency. Surprisingly you can't tell you lost that much if it happen gradually. You just don't realize you no longer hear the birds chirping or the computer fan running. Eventually you realize you have a hard time understanding people and ask them to repeat words. When you get hearing aids you realize your brain has been trying to compensate for this hearing loss. You relied on lip movements and context more. Suddenly everything sounds much louder with hearing aids. But over time your brain adapts back.
- rhubarbcustard 6y ago
  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.
herodotus 6y ago
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 that the objective of hearing aids (for mild hearing loss like mine) is to boost frequencies just enough for them to be audible to my brain, at which stage the non-linear system in my brain processes the signals to sound normal. I have not confirmed this speculation with an audiologist, so I would love comments on this from someone who works on hearing-aid software.
- Veen 6y ago
  I recently noticed that my high-frequency hearing was going (40-yr-old man). My GF (works in a hospital) brought home a digital thermometer that beeps when it's finished a reading. My GF can hear the beeps clearly, but I cannot. She has to tell me when the thermometer is ready to be read. Perhaps I should go to an audiologist to get a proper exam.
  - herodotus 6y ago
    You should: I am told that the older you are, the harder it is to adapt to hearing aids.
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      > I am told that the older you are, the harder it is to adapt to hearing aids. I started wearing hearing aides in my mid 50s and had no issues, and the positive effect on my hearing was immediately obvious (night and day, in fact). However, I think if you were much older and losing manual dexterity and visual acuity there might be problems - e.g. they can be quite fiddly to put in and clean on a daily basis. Cleaning the tube that goes in your ear is like threading a large needle with a fat wire. Steady fingers and corrected eyesight helps.
    - rhubarbcustard 6y ago
fallingfrog 6y ago
You could make an analog version of this fairly easily too, with a handful of resistors and capacitors to form a high pass network and a signal booster to get the 60db of gain you need.
inthenutshell 6y ago
Just wowww
- LarvaFX 6y ago
  I know, right?!
caeril 6y ago
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 to people.
- quercusa 6y ago
  This sounds like the 'Cocktail Party Effect', which usually gets worse with age. I've started to experience it in restaurants with lots of hard surfaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect
- 4ad 6y ago
  I have the same problem. As an additional data point, I have no problem hearing the dialog in documentaries, youtube shows, "casual" TV shows, etc, but I am having a very hard time understanding the dialog in movies and more serious TV shows.
  - frompdx 6y ago
    It seems like around 2000 dialogue in movies and TV shows started to get quieter and quieter while action sequences got louder and louder. It's awful. I am hearing impaired and I watch everything with subtitles, however, I really don't have an issue with intelligibility of dialogue while watching older shows and movies.
    - layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
      That's because older movies were mastered for stereo instead of surround sound. If surround sound is downmixed to stereo, extra care must be taken to compensate for the loss of spatial information, otherwise the dialogs get overwhelmed by the sound effects from the surround channels.
- rhubarbcustard 6y ago
rhubarbcustard 6y ago
Chuffed to not only see a hearing related post on the front page of HN but also that you used my Audiogram Creator to generate your results.
- criddell 6y ago
  Is there an at-home test I can do to get the data to fill out an audiogram on your site?
adyer07 6y ago
The final recording is interesting as someone with average hearing - it almost sounds like someone with a lisp articulating very, very carefully. I suppose “s” must be a very high frequency sound.
skybrian 6y ago
It might be interesting to do some experiments that audiologists don’t do. In particular, music recognition, like recognizing the difference between major and minor chords. In addition to my normal hearing loss, I sometimes have trouble with this in one ear. Fortunately it has always gone away, so far. I suspect that some amount of this is your brain adapting to changes in hearing. Perhaps there is some way to study how people adjust to wearing new hearing aids?
dschuetz 6y ago
It's very interesting to read that you actually need to wear your hearing aids all the time. Because, I have the exact same condition with almost exactly the same loss curve (except at 8kHz where it's ~10dB above yours), but I only need to wear my aids in conferences or lectures (school was particularly hard). I refused to wear them and still do, because they wear me out in 1-2 hours. Now, I have more severe problems, because of all this teleconferencing going on. Not a single smartphone I know supports what you are doing on the PC. Are there any?
- andrelaszlo 6y ago
  I was told that the more you wear them the more your brain adjusts, normally. Eventually you might be more tired without them.
  - dschuetz 6y ago
    My experience is quite different: if I don't wear them I am in control when I get tired. I get tired when I need to focus too much on lipreading and actually following the conversation. If there is nothing worth listening to I don't get tired. I'm used/adapted to go without them, so basically forcing myself to "re-adjust" my brain by wearing them all the time would make my hearing actually far worse than it feels. It's really weird, each doctor who examined my hearing was amazed how well I actually hear without any aids with my condition. So, I was good with wearing aids only when I really needed them, but with teleconferencing it doesn't work anymore and would be worse if I was used to wearing aids.
    - andrelaszlo 6y ago
      > It's really weird, each doctor who examined my hearing was amazed how well I actually hear without any aids with my condition. The brain is amazing - I realized how much I rely on visual cues for hearing when I very faintly "heard" a GIF of someone mouthing the words f* you! Another thing is the ambiguity that comes with not really hearing high pitched sounds - many words with consonants become very hard to distinguish. "Cat - hat - sat" are similar visually and if you only hear "at - at - at", your brain is still able to tell which one is the correct by context. This is terrible when learning a new language though.
geocrasher 6y ago
I have proven hearing loss in my right ear, and some in my left, but the right side is worst. The most difficult thing is that my frequency range is skewed toward the bass. I have trouble hearing high frequency sounds, but the low frequency sounds are extra loud to me. As a result, most sound is to "bass"y for me. I've been using technology to adjust for this since I was a kid in the 1980's and 90's: Turn the treble up, the bass down on every radio I own. I recently installed VoiceMeter Banana on my PC and I can use it to do the same thing. It really can help!
Sunspark 6y ago
Very cool, very interesting.
jessaustin 6y ago
I'm pleasantly surprised I'm able to hear the sweep all the way up to 8000 Hz! It's just slightly quieter at the top...
CurtHagenlocher 6y ago
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... .
- pdfernhout 6y ago
  Indeed! And here is even a website which uses pre-made tones and generates a personal audiogram with a bookmarkable link: https://hearingtest.online/ https://hearingtest.online/
TheRealPomax 6y ago
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.
- letitbeirie 6y ago
  I have had the same experience several times now. "Oh you have perfect hearing." No I don't, I can hear a constant ringing at all times and can't understand anything being said on a speaker phone. My high-range hearing is shot, you just can't measure it. I even know the exact frequency of the ringing - it's 15,734 Hz, from the flyback transformers of old CRT monitors. It's kind of weird to know that but have multiple audiologists be unable to check.
  - TheRealPomax 6y ago
    "we tailored the test so that we don't have to acknowledge that almost a fifth of the entire population suffers from something that we can only describe with a word for the symptom, not even several different diagnostic terms for possible causes" It's deeply disappointing.
Seanambers 6y ago
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.
- antman 6y ago
  In what way were you unhappy with Lasik? Was it a matter of ecpectations or do you consider the end result could be better?
  - Seanambers 6y ago
    Sorry for the late reply, but basically, - for me - the procedure is window dressing, its a a scam. I don't have any hard numbers to give you, but i assume 7/8 out of ten patients get away with it. For the remaining 10-20% of patients (atleast) theres no recourse and they have to live with the shitty results. I thought i did my due diligence, but i only read medical papers, and in medical papers they standardize results. So if you see 3 sharp A's thats 20/20, even though theres only one A on the board. And this is not to mention halos, starburst(just google them). From my perspective they lie about the risk and it's an filthy industry built on this lie. I've used glasses and contact lenses and i have never had so many issues with my eyes as after i had laser treatment on my eyes. The biggest one was a migraine that would go away after 10 minutes if i closed one eye but i had it for 1 1 /2 year. I can honestly tell you that that shit brok me. Enduring pain every day will fuck you up. So i had different results on both my eyes, not particular good on either i'd say but according to the optometrist i had great vision. Eventually the pain subsided, but it's not gone and comes back quite often (multiple times each day) Then theres the discrepancy in vision quality. One thing is not seeing sharp - how about text appearing grey in one eye and not the other. I have double vision albeit only under certain circumstances(light). I have variable sharpness. I have have hazy vision. I have a 2k USD OLED that i dont use, because white letters on black background is like a river of white fog beneathe the text. It's like a light shadow thats below bright stuff. I also have this in real life, i see two white powercables, one like a opaque version of the other. My night vision is a tragedy, the red break lights on a car will appear as large as a house with enough distance(it gets worse the further away i am from the source). Frontlights will blind me, led lights from scooters are offensive. So all in all it bad all around. Nothing good to say about it at all. Turns out theres these things called Higher order aberrations which basically is unevenness in the lens after treatment, which makes light bend. And get this, they don't diagnose for this because they don't have any tools or treatment for it basically. Found this site after the fact ; https://lasikcomplications.com/ https://lasikcomplications.com/
nitrogen 6y ago
I found it very interesting that (unless I misread) you are applying a time-varying gain to the whole spectrum rather than using a simple filter or EQ. Have you experimented with setting a 31-band graphic EQ to the inverse of your audiogram, or multiplying the FFT bands by a frequency-dependent gain and using IFFT? If so, does the time-windowing approach work better?
- joerick 6y ago
  I would also be curious to know this. Maybe it's possible that non linearities of hearing make the time-based approach better?
sensitive-ears 6y ago
Anyone got any good ideas for the reverse problem? I can still hear 20khz at 30 years old, which is the standard switching frequency for most power supplies. Induction cooktops drive me up the wall, I can't stand to be close to one when its on. (And yes, I've recorded the sound, run it through a fft, removed the lower frequencies and it still annoys me)
orff 6y ago
There is one major flaw in the presented approach. The base of any hearing aid is frequency compression (in each frequency band), as the hearing impairment induce, that a patient loss the ability to hear the soft sounds, but the loud sound cannot be amplified, as the threshold of pain remains the same. Usually, the gain curve resembles two linear lines. Feel free to reach out https://www.linkedin.com/in/vbouse https://www.linkedin.com/in/vbouse if you wanna discuss the topic in more depth (i designed some algorithms for hearing aids)

156 points by paddlesteamer 6y ago

Do you hear the constant "i"? Why every ppl is ears tested in societies? :D

Now this is a real hacker post! Kudos to the author. I have some mild tinnitus and listen to hours of audiobooks a day. I could see this being a great add-on to apps like Audible or Bound.

fallingfrog 6y ago

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?

KineticLensman 6y ago
> I wonder if modern hearing aids work in a similar way- by tuning their response to the person wearing them? I have a basic model provided free by the (UK) NHS. It is tuned to my audiogram by my NHS audiologist. More sophisticated models do a lot of tailoring, both to the person and to the environment. By way of example: https://wdh02.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon-us/main/download-center/opn-s/brochure/16699---15555-10367----2019-opn-s---product-guide.pdf?rev=EAE3&la=en https://wdh02.azureedge.net/-/media/oticon-us/main/download-...
tgv 6y ago
"Mild" in contrast to "severe". With a 30dB loss, you can still hear the louder noises, speech, etc. I have a 30dB loss in the mid range in one ear, just where it matters for speech. I can hear and understand people pretty well, but fail when they are whispering, or when they are speaking something else than my native language in a noisy environment. On the positive side: if I sleep on my good ear, a lot of the background noise disappears.
- fallingfrog 6y ago
  I am 41 and I can still hear tones out to about 17khz. Spent a lot of time in rock shows in my 20’s too. If I knew what I had done right I’d put it in a bottle and sell it. Probably time will catch up to me too in a few years.
pkaye 6y ago
I have age related hearing loss with 30db at low frequency and 65db at high frequency. Surprisingly you can't tell you lost that much if it happen gradually. You just don't realize you no longer hear the birds chirping or the computer fan running. Eventually you realize you have a hard time understanding people and ask them to repeat words. When you get hearing aids you realize your brain has been trying to compensate for this hearing loss. You relied on lip movements and context more. Suddenly everything sounds much louder with hearing aids. But over time your brain adapts back.
rhubarbcustard 6y ago
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.

herodotus 6y ago

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 that the objective of hearing aids (for mild hearing loss like mine) is to boost frequencies just enough for them to be audible to my brain, at which stage the non-linear system in my brain processes the signals to sound normal. I have not confirmed this speculation with an audiologist, so I would love comments on this from someone who works on hearing-aid software.

Veen 6y ago
I recently noticed that my high-frequency hearing was going (40-yr-old man). My GF (works in a hospital) brought home a digital thermometer that beeps when it's finished a reading. My GF can hear the beeps clearly, but I cannot. She has to tell me when the thermometer is ready to be read. Perhaps I should go to an audiologist to get a proper exam.
- herodotus 6y ago
  You should: I am told that the older you are, the harder it is to adapt to hearing aids.
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > I am told that the older you are, the harder it is to adapt to hearing aids. I started wearing hearing aides in my mid 50s and had no issues, and the positive effect on my hearing was immediately obvious (night and day, in fact). However, I think if you were much older and losing manual dexterity and visual acuity there might be problems - e.g. they can be quite fiddly to put in and clean on a daily basis. Cleaning the tube that goes in your ear is like threading a large needle with a fat wire. Steady fingers and corrected eyesight helps.
  - rhubarbcustard 6y ago

fallingfrog 6y ago

You could make an analog version of this fairly easily too, with a handful of resistors and capacitors to form a high pass network and a signal booster to get the 60db of gain you need.

inthenutshell 6y ago

Just wowww

LarvaFX 6y ago
I know, right?!

caeril 6y ago

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 to people.

quercusa 6y ago
This sounds like the 'Cocktail Party Effect', which usually gets worse with age. I've started to experience it in restaurants with lots of hard surfaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect
4ad 6y ago
I have the same problem. As an additional data point, I have no problem hearing the dialog in documentaries, youtube shows, "casual" TV shows, etc, but I am having a very hard time understanding the dialog in movies and more serious TV shows.
- frompdx 6y ago
  It seems like around 2000 dialogue in movies and TV shows started to get quieter and quieter while action sequences got louder and louder. It's awful. I am hearing impaired and I watch everything with subtitles, however, I really don't have an issue with intelligibility of dialogue while watching older shows and movies.
  - layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
    That's because older movies were mastered for stereo instead of surround sound. If surround sound is downmixed to stereo, extra care must be taken to compensate for the loss of spatial information, otherwise the dialogs get overwhelmed by the sound effects from the surround channels.
rhubarbcustard 6y ago

rhubarbcustard 6y ago

Chuffed to not only see a hearing related post on the front page of HN but also that you used my Audiogram Creator to generate your results.

criddell 6y ago
Is there an at-home test I can do to get the data to fill out an audiogram on your site?

adyer07 6y ago

The final recording is interesting as someone with average hearing - it almost sounds like someone with a lisp articulating very, very carefully. I suppose “s” must be a very high frequency sound.

skybrian 6y ago

It might be interesting to do some experiments that audiologists don’t do. In particular, music recognition, like recognizing the difference between major and minor chords. In addition to my normal hearing loss, I sometimes have trouble with this in one ear. Fortunately it has always gone away, so far. I suspect that some amount of this is your brain adapting to changes in hearing. Perhaps there is some way to study how people adjust to wearing new hearing aids?

dschuetz 6y ago

It's very interesting to read that you actually need to wear your hearing aids all the time. Because, I have the exact same condition with almost exactly the same loss curve (except at 8kHz where it's ~10dB above yours), but I only need to wear my aids in conferences or lectures (school was particularly hard). I refused to wear them and still do, because they wear me out in 1-2 hours. Now, I have more severe problems, because of all this teleconferencing going on. Not a single smartphone I know supports what you are doing on the PC. Are there any?

andrelaszlo 6y ago
I was told that the more you wear them the more your brain adjusts, normally. Eventually you might be more tired without them.
- dschuetz 6y ago
  My experience is quite different: if I don't wear them I am in control when I get tired. I get tired when I need to focus too much on lipreading and actually following the conversation. If there is nothing worth listening to I don't get tired. I'm used/adapted to go without them, so basically forcing myself to "re-adjust" my brain by wearing them all the time would make my hearing actually far worse than it feels. It's really weird, each doctor who examined my hearing was amazed how well I actually hear without any aids with my condition. So, I was good with wearing aids only when I really needed them, but with teleconferencing it doesn't work anymore and would be worse if I was used to wearing aids.
  - andrelaszlo 6y ago
    > It's really weird, each doctor who examined my hearing was amazed how well I actually hear without any aids with my condition. The brain is amazing - I realized how much I rely on visual cues for hearing when I very faintly "heard" a GIF of someone mouthing the words f* you! Another thing is the ambiguity that comes with not really hearing high pitched sounds - many words with consonants become very hard to distinguish. "Cat - hat - sat" are similar visually and if you only hear "at - at - at", your brain is still able to tell which one is the correct by context. This is terrible when learning a new language though.

geocrasher 6y ago

I have proven hearing loss in my right ear, and some in my left, but the right side is worst. The most difficult thing is that my frequency range is skewed toward the bass. I have trouble hearing high frequency sounds, but the low frequency sounds are extra loud to me. As a result, most sound is to "bass"y for me. I've been using technology to adjust for this since I was a kid in the 1980's and 90's: Turn the treble up, the bass down on every radio I own. I recently installed VoiceMeter Banana on my PC and I can use it to do the same thing. It really can help!

Sunspark 6y ago

Very cool, very interesting.

jessaustin 6y ago

I'm pleasantly surprised I'm able to hear the sweep all the way up to 8000 Hz! It's just slightly quieter at the top...

CurtHagenlocher 6y ago

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... .

pdfernhout 6y ago
Indeed! And here is even a website which uses pre-made tones and generates a personal audiogram with a bookmarkable link: https://hearingtest.online/ https://hearingtest.online/

TheRealPomax 6y ago

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.

letitbeirie 6y ago
I have had the same experience several times now. "Oh you have perfect hearing." No I don't, I can hear a constant ringing at all times and can't understand anything being said on a speaker phone. My high-range hearing is shot, you just can't measure it. I even know the exact frequency of the ringing - it's 15,734 Hz, from the flyback transformers of old CRT monitors. It's kind of weird to know that but have multiple audiologists be unable to check.
- TheRealPomax 6y ago
  "we tailored the test so that we don't have to acknowledge that almost a fifth of the entire population suffers from something that we can only describe with a word for the symptom, not even several different diagnostic terms for possible causes" It's deeply disappointing.

Seanambers 6y ago

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.

antman 6y ago
In what way were you unhappy with Lasik? Was it a matter of ecpectations or do you consider the end result could be better?
- Seanambers 6y ago
  Sorry for the late reply, but basically, - for me - the procedure is window dressing, its a a scam. I don't have any hard numbers to give you, but i assume 7/8 out of ten patients get away with it. For the remaining 10-20% of patients (atleast) theres no recourse and they have to live with the shitty results. I thought i did my due diligence, but i only read medical papers, and in medical papers they standardize results. So if you see 3 sharp A's thats 20/20, even though theres only one A on the board. And this is not to mention halos, starburst(just google them). From my perspective they lie about the risk and it's an filthy industry built on this lie. I've used glasses and contact lenses and i have never had so many issues with my eyes as after i had laser treatment on my eyes. The biggest one was a migraine that would go away after 10 minutes if i closed one eye but i had it for 1 1 /2 year. I can honestly tell you that that shit brok me. Enduring pain every day will fuck you up. So i had different results on both my eyes, not particular good on either i'd say but according to the optometrist i had great vision. Eventually the pain subsided, but it's not gone and comes back quite often (multiple times each day) Then theres the discrepancy in vision quality. One thing is not seeing sharp - how about text appearing grey in one eye and not the other. I have double vision albeit only under certain circumstances(light). I have variable sharpness. I have have hazy vision. I have a 2k USD OLED that i dont use, because white letters on black background is like a river of white fog beneathe the text. It's like a light shadow thats below bright stuff. I also have this in real life, i see two white powercables, one like a opaque version of the other. My night vision is a tragedy, the red break lights on a car will appear as large as a house with enough distance(it gets worse the further away i am from the source). Frontlights will blind me, led lights from scooters are offensive. So all in all it bad all around. Nothing good to say about it at all. Turns out theres these things called Higher order aberrations which basically is unevenness in the lens after treatment, which makes light bend. And get this, they don't diagnose for this because they don't have any tools or treatment for it basically. Found this site after the fact ; https://lasikcomplications.com/ https://lasikcomplications.com/

nitrogen 6y ago

I found it very interesting that (unless I misread) you are applying a time-varying gain to the whole spectrum rather than using a simple filter or EQ. Have you experimented with setting a 31-band graphic EQ to the inverse of your audiogram, or multiplying the FFT bands by a frequency-dependent gain and using IFFT? If so, does the time-windowing approach work better?

joerick 6y ago
I would also be curious to know this. Maybe it's possible that non linearities of hearing make the time-based approach better?

sensitive-ears 6y ago

Anyone got any good ideas for the reverse problem? I can still hear 20khz at 30 years old, which is the standard switching frequency for most power supplies. Induction cooktops drive me up the wall, I can't stand to be close to one when its on. (And yes, I've recorded the sound, run it through a fft, removed the lower frequencies and it still annoys me)

orff 6y ago

There is one major flaw in the presented approach. The base of any hearing aid is frequency compression (in each frequency band), as the hearing impairment induce, that a patient loss the ability to hear the soft sounds, but the loud sound cannot be amplified, as the threshold of pain remains the same. Usually, the gain curve resembles two linear lines. Feel free to reach out https://www.linkedin.com/in/vbouse https://www.linkedin.com/in/vbouse if you wanna discuss the topic in more depth (i designed some algorithms for hearing aids)