13 ms·

Can't you just turn up the volume?

545 points by varunsrin 12y ago

larrybolt 12y ago
This was an interesting read, but what to me personally is more interesting is how to prevent hearing loss over the years. I might be wrong on this, but I recall a hearing specialist advising me not to use earbuds at all, or at least limit the use to max 1 hour at a time. A dynamic headphones, such as the good old Superlux HD 681 would be "better" in the long term. (Not trying to advertise for that headphone, it's just one of the few that is cheap, good, and I can rewire myself and even add a plug so I can easily buy new aux cables). However I cannot wear my headphone longer than 6 hours without it getting annoying. And running with a big headphone is a big no, but than again, I'm nowhere near to running longer than 30 minutes in a row. Anyone who has his own thoughts on this topic?
- Symbiote 12y ago
  I use earbuds, but I set the volume while I'm somewhere quiet. If the underground train is drowning out the music, so be it. I've also used reusable earplugs (I spent about £15) for all gigs, nightclubs etc. Sometimes I use them in noisy pubs. > However I cannot wear my headphone longer than 6 hours without it getting annoying. That's a really long time. Wouldn't it be best to reduce it? The main charity for deaf people in the UK, which seems to have renamed itself from the "Royal National Institute for the Deaf" to "Action on Hearing Loss", has a campaign called [Don't lose the music](http://www.dontlosethemusic.org.uk/ http://www.dontlosethemusic.org.uk/).
  - larrybolt 12y ago
    I don't often go to clubs or places in general with loud music, but I play music trough earbuds/headphones to shut out distracting noises around me. And I guess to get "in the zone". I'm going to look up if there would be earplugs that could help me with that. And 6 hours is seldom, it's the max, but average I do go above the suggested 1 hour.
- dsr_ 12y ago
  If your ears hurt or are annoyed, stop. Quiet is better than loud. The more sound isolation your phones provide from the outside world, the quieter you can play your music and enjoy it. If you're sitting with headphones on for six hours, maybe you should get up a few times.
  - larrybolt 12y ago
    > If your ears hurt or are annoyed, stop. I'd say it's more from the pushing on the sides of my head, not so much from the volume of the music. But you are right, and I have been thinking about stopping listening to music trough headphones when working, and use speakers. > If you're sitting with headphones on for six hours, maybe you should get up a few times. I have to say that my current working desk and rhythm is pretty much perfect as far as I know. My eyes never get tired, the screens are a good distance away from me, and I don't have to look down. I have a decent computer chair, and I take breaks about every hour, to go outside or get a new cup of coffee (but I do that with my headphones/earbuds in). Heck, no employee can offer a better working situation if you ask me, I'm all for the working remote - office not required-idea! :P
- Anechoic 12y ago
  I might be wrong on this, but I recall a hearing specialist advising me not to use earbuds at all, or at least limit the use to max 1 hour at a time. The issue isn't necessarily about all "earbuds," the issue is that many earbuds (including the ones included with Apple iOS products) don't seal the ear canal very well, so a listener is exposed to outside sounds in addition to sounds from the player. Since the outside sounds have a tendency to mask the sounds coming from the earbuds, the listener will often turn up the volume to better hear the audio material and therefore be exposed to SPL's that can cause hearing damage over long exposure times. The advice to use something like the Superlux HD 681 is that circumaural headphones offer some (not a lot, but some) shielding from outside noise, so a user won't be tempted to increase the volume level as much. Active noise canceling headsets and in-ear-monitors (like Etymotics-brand) provide better sound isolation so that users can keep the volume at more moderate levels.
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - pierrec 12y ago
    >the issue is that many earbuds don't seal the ear canal very well For those wondering which earbuds do provide decent isolation, there are, as you stated, the pretty expensive "in-ear-monitors", but you can also go for cheaper earbuds based on isolating memory foam like the JVC marshmallows, which are pretty cheap and provide decent isolation.
  - im3w1l 12y ago
    For really high noise environments, like airplanes, I like using 30db dampening earplugs and then circumaural heaphones over them.
  - bashinator 12y ago
    Exactly. With my Etymotics in-canal buds, I can set the volume on my music player to about 25-30%. With the stock buds or even non-isolating over-the-ear headphones, the same subjective loudness requires about 60-75% on the volume control.
- varunsrin 12y ago
  OP here. Some argue that in-ear earbuds send more high frequency energy directly into the ear than headphones, so the balance of sound is always tilted towards the highs, which over time can cause more high-frequency loss (low frequency loss is fairly uncommon). The difference between headphones and earbuds is likely minor - the volume you set your music to probably has a much greater impact. Get a pair with good isolation or cancellation, so you can keep the music volume lower. One thing that works really well for preserving your hearing is taking breaks - this is especially true of loud concerts (step out for a bathroom break once an hour), but also holds true if you're going to listen to headphones at high volumes for many hours straight.
- hoggle 12y ago
  Be aware that many prescription medications are ototoxic (e.g. Aspirin). I recently had a routine check-up of my hearing and at 31 my actual "hearing age" is supposedly 66 for higher frequencies - permanent hearing loss most likely brought on by Wellbutrin which I took for some weeks only (I've never been exposed to loud noises and never was much of a headphones user). Just putting it out there, be wary with prescriptions of Wellbutrin especially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ototoxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ototoxicity
- rtpg 12y ago
  I remember with a pair of earbuds getting a little informational thing on the correct volume. Their rule of thumb is if you are incapable of hearing and understanding what people are telling you without taking out your earbuds, they're too loud. I tried this out, and found that I'm actually fine with the volume bar being maybe 30% of what I used to. Basically, put your earbuds in, play some music, and try to talk to someone. If you're unable to then you might be playing your music way too loud. (For people using earbuds to drown workplace noise out, I'd suggest an ambient noise program like noiz.io. You can train your brain to filter ambient background noise, and its better than trying to 1-up the sounds in your office)
  - randlet 12y ago
    "incapable of hearing and understanding what people are telling you without taking out your earbuds" High quality isolating earbuds should make it pretty difficult to tell what other people are saying even with no music playing! Moving to a mid-range pair of Etymotic noise isolating earbuds was an absolute revelation for me and allowed me to use significantly lower volumes when listening to music. I can't recommend high quality isolating headphones/earbuds enough.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  I've lost hearing in my left ear, and I'm pretty sure it's due to years of driving with the window down.
- enneff 12y ago
  I wear good quality noise cancelling headphones with the music turned quite low. I feel like this is doing a lot to preserve my hearing.
- ddingus 12y ago
  In addition to poor isolation noted here, many cheap-o earbuds have a horrible response curve. They deliver way too much sound in narrow frequency ranges, usually the mid-range, say 1-4Khz, while not enough in the bass, and it's a mixed bag higher up through 10Khz+ People will turn it up, until they are hearing everything, and they do very significant damage to those "hot spot" frequency ranges, despite the overall perception of volume seeming reasonable to them. Add overly compressed music, and or crappy audio output, and the need to drive it loud happens to nearly everybody. There will be a whole generation of people, some who we are already seeing struggle with this, requiring adaptive sound options more early in life than is typical.
adamnemecek 12y ago
I might be wrong here but isn't what you call "dynamic range" usually referred to as "hearing range"? Dynamic range has a bit different connotation AFAIK.
- afandian 12y ago
  I think that the first use of "dynamic range" is clumsily worded. > Dynamic range is the range of frequencies and volumes that are audible to the human ear But reading on, it looks like it is used in the correct sense albeit it a specialised one. The article discusses dynamic ranges per frequency. Talking about multi-band compression confirms that.
- baddox 12y ago
  A lot of the concepts in this article appear to be deliberately simplified and terminology deliberately abused, and I would argue too much so. Take this paragraph for instance: > As you look at the waveform, the problem should become apparent. Sound is a 3-dimensional construct, but we can only represent 2 dimensions on a textbook or a monitor. In the waveform representation, we see Time on the x-axis plotted against Volume on the y-axis. The two axes in most waveform plots are sound pressure and time, not volume and time. The fact that the waveform depicted is nearly symmetrical reflected across the x axis should hint that this is the case.
zenocon 12y ago
"Why can't I just turn up the volume on my iPhone?" is something I ask myself everyday and shake my fist toward Cupertino. Seriously, the gain on the phone is severely limited. Try listening to a voice call on speakerphone in even a moderately quiet environment with just a twee bit of ambient noise. It is maddening that I can't get any more volume out of this device without jailbreaking it.
- darklajid 12y ago
  I'm not trying to pull your leg here, but .. why would you try to use the speaker if there's noise around you? I mean, why wouldn't you - like - put it up against your ear instead?
  - TallGuyShort 12y ago
    I do it all the time in mildly noisy environments: - Impromptu "conference call" with a colleague physically next to you and another one remote. - Need to be typing to take minutes, retrieve information relevant to the call, etc. - Too many calls already and arm is tired of holding the phone and listening.
  - ics 12y ago
    Any scenario where you'd want to use the speaker phone has little to do with noise. Sometimes I want it while driving because I don't have a headset (and don't plan on getting one, since I don't own a car and drive rarely). Or in the shop while drilling, soldering, or whatever. Or outside working on something. It's about using the phone while doing something else, often something that you couldn't do with something blocking one ear or dangling anything from your head. Then of course there's the case where multiple people are listening/speaking through the same phone.
    - soperj 12y ago
      Seriously.. just don't talk while driving. It's dangerous for everyone.
a2kadet 12y ago
> "Sound expresses itself in three dimensions: time (seconds), volume (decibels) and frequency (Hertz)." Is anyone else as irked about the authors choice of the word dimensions as much as I am? I can't read past it. Wouldn't "factors" be a better fit?
- sls 12y ago
  Seemed natural to me, dimensions in a phase space.
- jeremysmyth 12y ago
  No. "Dimensions" is the right word, because they are three orthogonal scales along which musical notes can be measured[1]. The author could also have suggested timbre and other possible dimensions, but the three stated apply to all sound, including (importantly) sine waves, the simplest type of sound. [1] Technically, frequency is a function of time too (and timbre a function of the interaction of multiple frequencies and envelope changes, another function of time) but these are all independent uses of time.
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    Technically there are two complementary sets of dimensions: time and amplitude vs frequency and phase. Both are complete encodings of the waveform. The article is extremely muddled from a technical point of view. When dealing with perceptions it is extremely important to distinguish physics and physiology. In optics we have radiometric (physical) vs photometric (perceived) values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometry_%28optics%29#Photometric_versus_radiometric_quantities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometry_%28optics%29#Photom... It appears in the article they are doing some kind of implicit averaging over the ear's response function at each frequency, which may make sense in terms of perceptions but makes very little sense in terms of physics. A much better visual analog would be a blurred photograph rather than a cropped one. "Turning up the volume" simply increases the brightness of the images, which doesn't do a damned thing to reduce the blurring. One thing that people with normal hearing don't get is how much information is in the high frequencies, which are where the most loss normally occurs, although there are also "notch" losses that happen to people whose ears are routinely subject to loud noises in narrow bands. We tend to think of "high frequency" sounds in terms of single notes, but in speech the high frequencies are most important in the unvoiced constants, the "s" and "th" sounds and similar. Losing the high frequencies blurs the edges of speech, often making the shape of it unrecognizable. Frequency-dependent enhancement sharpens the edges and brings it back into useful focus.
korethr 12y ago
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 his hearing loss better than just constantly buying batteries. However, I do have one complaint with the article, and that's their (mis)use of terminology, specifically, dynamic range. Dynamic range is not, as they claim, the range of frequencies one can hear, from lowest to highest (e.g. 20Hz-20kHz). That's bandwidth. What dynamic range is, is the ratio of quietest to loudest sounds possible, often expressed in dB.[1] For example, as they mention, human hearing has about 120dB of dynamic range. An audio CD can encode a dynamic range of 96dB. The 24-bit files professional audio studios work with can represent up to 144dB of dynamic range. Perhaps it's a pedantic distinction, but using already existing terms for what you mean to say is less likely to cause confusion than misusing one that means something else. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range
- Stratoscope 12y ago
  You're not being pedantic at all. It's a fairly egregious error for an article about hearing. It would be like an article about a camera talking about its fast f/1.4 shutter speed.
  - bigiain 12y ago
    Curiously, that sort of language is used by camera people. Aperture and shutter speed are not the same thing, but they are inextricably linked to each other (in a way that dynamic range (in the amplitude sense) and frequency response/range are not nearly so linked). In a "camera article", the phrase " ... its fast f/1.4 shutter speed." would probably be in the context of saying something about one or more of the sensor's size, sensitivity, or noise-floor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_speed "Lens speed refers to the maximum aperture diameter, or minimum f-number, of a photographic lens. A lens with a larger maximum aperture (that is, a smaller minimum f-number) is called a "fast lens" because it delivers more light intensity (illuminance) to the focal plane, achieving the same exposure with a faster shutter speed."
s0rce 12y ago
Spatial frequencies in the image might have been a much better analogy instead of simply cropping the image size.
anigbrowl 12y ago
What’s the solution? Multi-Band Compression (MBC), a technique that’s been used by the $6 billion hearing aid industry to solve this specific problem. An MBC uses intelligent design instead of a one-size-fits-all method. With the right data about your hearing pattern, it can mash the full sound into your range so that you get all the information you need. Audio engineer here. That is patently untrue. MBC is a super-useful technique and is indeed helpful for mitigating hearing loss in relatively transparent fashion, but it does not and cannot bring sounds from outside someone's audible hearing range back within it. It will dynamically rebalance incoming audio in inverse proportion to the degree of hearing loss within a set of frequency ranges, but many kinds of sensorineural hearing loss involve the death of cilia cells (the tiny hairs thatvibrate at particular frequencies, much like the bins of of an FFT) which can result in a total loss of perception at or above certain frequencies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorineural_hearing_loss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorineural_hearing_loss To 'mash the full sound into your range' requires a technique known as frequency shifting, but that's problematic because it destroys the harmonic relationships of the incoming material and sounds disorienting, at best. In any case, I think the illustration of the bear on the tricycle is absurdly simplistic and makes me wonder to what the degree the pp designers really grasp the underlying concept. A much more appropriate parallel would have been to show an image with a severe Gaussian blur, which more closely parallels the actual experience of hearing loss in terms of both empirical measurement (higher frequencies tend to be more severely attenuated in cases of induced hearing loss) and subjective experience (blurring hinders edge detection, which is analogous to transient detection in audio, and which has a large role in speech intelligibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur If you're struggling with hearing loss, then you should really, really consult an audiologist, work out the basis of your hearing loss (which is sometimes as simple as impacted earwax), and work out a treatment strategy. If you're suffering from degenerative hearing loss then listening to overly-compressed music could actually accelerate it, and listening on headphones or earbuds (many of which bias the sound for increased impact) could also contribute to the problem. It's a truism in the pro audio world that most people are awful at self-measurement and tend to over-equalize in the absence of proper experimental control protocols. I apologize for the rather negative tone of the post; I appreciate the people at SoundFocus are trying to provide people with something useful and helpful at minimal cost, by leveraging the pretty good audio hardware in their phone. However, hearing loss tends to be a one-way thing, and I think that offering a product to that market without a clinician on the team is a bad idea. There's a lot more to being an 'audio ninja' than understanding the fundamentals of DSP.
pizza 12y ago
This article would be great if they replaced their frequency-domain 'dynamic range' terminology with the standard word for it, bandwidth.
- korethr 12y ago
  Thank you. This was the word I was looking for, but escaped me when I wrote my own commment.
dghughes 12y ago
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 non-verbal sounds is noise that obscures all words to her. "What?" is the response to nearly every word from anyone mouth has to be repeated twice except in a dead silent room. She listens to the TV on level 20 and it's very draining to everyone around the person. But she won't get a hearing aid! She's 70 years-old but refuses to even discuss it. It's odd how if you say to a person who can't see they may need glasses it's OK but if you say to a person hard of hearing the may need a hearing aid it's like you said the most obnoxious thing ever to say to anyone.
- codezero 12y ago
  I bet you'd find a lot of older people also unwilling to get new glasses or a stronger prescription. All the same, the taboo likely exists because it's common for young people to have myopia, but not poor hearing, so it's always OK to have glasses and never OK to need hearing augmentation. I really hope this taboo goes away as new generations get more and more comfortable with augmenting their senses.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  "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.
  - dghughes 12y ago
    I would have to ask my dad but I know when I am there I swear it's every time I say something except in an incredibly quiet room so tracking isn't necessary since it always occurs from my perspective. 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.
Scaevolus 12y ago
A spectrogram would show what MBC is doing far more directly than the waveform plots.
carlob 12y ago
I once went to a 3h long blackboard talk given by James Hudspeth [1] on the physics of hearing. It was one of the most fascinating things I've ever heard: it turns out that not only the cochlea performs a Fourier transform of the sounds we're hearing, but it can also selectively amplify some frequencies, by vibrating the very same hair that detect the sounds. Sometimes the mechanism that amplifies some sounds goes wrong and that's why sometimes old dogs seem to emit a high pitched sound from their ears, and also the cause of some forms of tinnitus. If you have some time to kill do go read the wikipedia pages of the cochlea and hair cells, it's really fascinating stuff! [1] http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/labheads/JamesHudspeth/ http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/labheads/JamesHu...
- HCIdivision17 12y ago
  I have always wondered if that high pitched sound was real! No one else heard it, and it makes so little sense I always figured it was my hearing.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    Do you hear that high-pitched sound all the time? That's tinnitus. Or do you only hear it from dogs?
    - HCIdivision17 12y ago
      It turns out I have really decent hearing. So it's unlikely to be tinnitus; at worst I have a sort of hearing after-image when a tonal frequency suddenly cuts out (and now I'm guessing that's an effect of the ear actively filtering - I can't wait to watch that video). But yeah, I did hear it on the dog. It's so anomalous to hear a high pitched noise coming from an ear that I was willing to question my own hearing/sanity. The best I could manage to guess was that there was some sort of small gas pocket leaking, which made a little bit of sense since my dog (samoyed) had a bubble on his ear (that eventually gave him a sadly adorable floppy ear when it eventually drained - prolly an aural hematoma); the bump never actually seemed to deflate due to the noise, though. At the time I was an early teen just sort of beginning to learn analytical techniques, so that reasoning was the best I could muster. These days I tend to trust/understand my senses more.
marquis 12y ago
While I appreciate the article, having hearing loss is not like losing context of an image such as not being able to see the bear on the tricycle. It's more like the image is fuzzy and depending on the factor of loss, it might be a bear or it might just be some fuzz: http://i.imgur.com/vKn7oTf.png http://i.imgur.com/vKn7oTf.png Audio compression, especially when using psychoacoustic principles, helps by lowering the noise of the unwanted sounds e.g "probably not a human voice" or "not a bear" in this case and increasing certain frequencies for a person's particular hearing range so they can "see" the image better.
- dghughes 12y ago
  I'd agree the fuzzy analogy is better since a hearing impaired person may think they understand but they don't, sometimes totally wrong. I recall reading that vowels are easier to hear than consonants or maybe it is vice versa? "Hello how are you today" may seem like "Hll hw r tdy" which to the hearing impaired person may seem like "How am I tidy?" or something totally incomprehensible but their brain makes up something close (incorrectly) by filling in the blanks. The Monty Python sketch "I'd like to buy a hearing aid" feels like what I go through daily when trying to communicate with my mother. I showed it to my mother thought it was funny, sometimes when she thinks she knows what I said but it's not even close it's like the sketch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7UqhDs8zj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7UqhDs8zj4
- deleted 12y ago
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roberthahn 12y ago
Interesting article. Thanks for posting, varunsrin! I've been following development of SoundFocus for awhile. I'm profoundly deaf. This is a technical term classifying the degree of hearing loss; to give you a sense of where this fits, the typical classification range is mild, moderate, severe, profound, total. Between a combination of hearing aids and lip-reading, I've done a reasonable job of integrating into a hearing society. Not perfect, but ok. I've often wished for a different approach to correcting hearing. It crystallized for me after I read this article by Jon Udell: http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-you-talk-to-a-person-with-hearing-loss/ http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-y... In that article, what Jon found was that his mom would hear best if you spoke at a low to medium volume close to her ear - this worked better than any shouting at a greater distance could accomplish. And it should be easy for you to simulate - get a friend to talk to you from 50' away - you can still hear them, but there's some detail loss that wouldn't happen if they're 3' away. I still benefit - a lot - from MBC, but if someone could come up with a way to make the incoming sound sound as if it were right beside me, man, that would really help me understand people clearly. One non-technical solution, that people use to ensure that deaf people can understand you clearly is to enunciate consonants audibly. An example of this is is the word "red" - it becomes "erREDdead". I don't know if there's a name for this so I can't point you to a page describing how to extra-enunciate all the letters. As useful as it is, people speaking to me like that always makes me feel like I'm dumb, because they sound dumb saying it. Clearly I have issues :-)
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  I don't think you have issues. I wonder if they sound dumb because of the difference to "normal" speech, where we typically say words in a daft manner to young children or those learning to speak? We associate them with reduced capabilities (in a sense) because they are children and are still learning. That isn't meant offensively, more that we know the child needs to learn? But if it helps you hear, I think it's great! That article you linked to was interesting. Thanks.
dlandis 12y ago
> If you know people who have hearing loss, you’ve noticed that they can’t tolerate loud noises that you’re fine with, but they also can’t hear some of things that you can hear perfectly well. So what is the explanation of why they can't tolerate certain loud noises? I feel like the article was going to address that aspect of hearing loss as well but never did.
- cheng1 12y ago
  Hearing is an range. So they have reduced range on both side.
  - dlandis 12y ago
    Hmm, I'm not sure you understand it any better than I do. The article says: >Well, if you get hearing damage at a specific frequency, you’ll start to lose sensitivity to the quiet sounds at this frequency. However, your sensitivity to loud sounds remains the same. If their sensitivity to loud sounds remained the same on the one hand, why would they be unable to tolerate certain sounds on the other hand. Seems contradictory.
    - ddingus 12y ago
      Over time, the ear loses it's ability to carry very loud sounds through all the stages needed for sensation. This manifests in two basic ways: 1. Fatigue. That pop music, "wall of loud sound" album was tolerable for a few hours at age 20, gets tiresome at 40, and could be almost painful at age 60. Hearing is a mechanical process, and worn out mechanical parts tend to rattle, lose response, etc... and this is fatigue. People will respond with something like, "I'm tired of hearing", and to them, the experience of hearing is no longer transparent at higher volumes and longer times. 2. Less dynamic range possible / pain Think of it like gamma for displays. There is a curve of sensation to input sound in db. People tend to vary a lot, but this curve gets bent away from the normal to a condition that is a lot like "crushed black" and white, where the upper limit of sound volume perception gets distorted. An unimpaired person can tell the difference between 60, 80, 100db. People who have aged and have losses, may not be able to tell much difference between those volume levels, resulting in "all loud sounds are just loud" not different amounts of loud. Also think of banding when color depth is reduced. Rather than a nice, smooth response, the listener gets more steps, or various steps may all present in ways that are similar when they should be easily distinguished. A related thing is discrimination, and it happens with pitch in the same way that it can happen with volume. Loss of pitch discrimination means being unable to distinguish between close frequencies, hearing them as one, or perhaps just as a muddled combination, not as two distinct tones. This is subtle, and it can happen with most other responses being normal. But the person just can't quite pick out the sounds, despite hearing them individually just fine. It's the combinations they struggle with.
gwern 12y ago
For people with hearing loss & run Linux: if you have your audiogram and an idea how your hearing loss varies by frequency, you can try to do selective boosts by frequency through a Pulseaudio filter. I discuss it a bit in https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/32qSkcQPbmQ https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/32qSkcQP...
- randlet 12y ago
  Nice! Thanks a lot for the link and writing that up!
- jkot 12y ago
  Thank you! This is pretty usefull for testing on grandma ☺
cheng1 12y ago
So it's like a CPU can't process fast enough and start to losing signals. Just like the choppy adobe flash player on OSX!
Jemaclus 12y ago
I'm completely deaf in my left ear, and I wear a hearing aid in my right ear. What's really cool is that my hearing aid has BlueTooth, and starting with the iPhone 5S, Apple supports direct-to-hearing-aid technology. That means when I get a phone call, it streams directly from the phone to my hearing aid -- not out of a speaker, directly to my ear. Very, very cool. Here's more info: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/hearing-aids/ https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/hearing-aids/ That said, if I had an older hearing aid or didn't have this one, I'd definitely use this app. They are spot on about hearing loss and how it's more than just a volume thing. In fact, most of hearing loss is really an understanding thing. I can hear your voice just fine -- I just can't hear 100% of it, so the words don't make sense to me right away.
sandworm 12y ago
I wish people would put half the effort into prevention that this article puts into mitigation. Work beside a machine humming at a particular frequency and you will loose that frequency even if the sound doesn't seem loud at the time. And simply jambing in a pair of earplugs doesn't make you immune. They have limits.
deleted 12y ago
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soj 12y ago
Hi folks, In order to summarize what I've read so far: This promotion article about SoundFocus is clearly not written with help of a professional from within the hearing aid industry nor from someone with clinical experience. The author shows to be good with language, probably an engineer who makes links with technical terms as if he knows what he is talking about. I find this article very misleading and not a help for the hearing disabled or their relatives. It reminds me of a very useful course I once followed:'physiology of the ear for physicists'. It would be good if the author or developers find something similar. I realize that my post breaths some arrogance and of course it is easy to burn something down. But yes, I know better. And yes, I could have written this article that would market SoundFocus properly (in a similar style if you like) with only useful and correct information. Maybe I should... ? Cheers -a professional-
- soj 12y ago
  My bro points out I did not mention a single flaw/example. (I am busy enough as it is) Besides things already mentioned by others, talking about dead regions, upwards spread of masking perhaps temporal scatter and tuning curves would have made it a lot more juicy. One flaw: time and volume are NOT self explanatory. Think about recruitment and such. Another flaw: multi-band compression is not doing what is suggested by the picture of the bear where the bicycle is missing. This visual example fits much better to a person with a dead region for whom frequency compression is applied. And this is not a one-size-fits-all method. Different techniques are available for this particular phenomenon (as there is frequency shifting as well). Anyway... let's mention a positive side. I appreciate the attempt of communicating on the topic and it was a good try to make things clearer for some. Better luck next time. Happy bro?
shreyas056 12y ago
tl;dr "hearing loss is caused by uneven or abnormal frequency response of ear compared to that of normal human"
kabouseng 12y ago
My wife is an audiologist, and she and her colleagues found this excellent. One suggestion if I may (actually that my wife made), is that where you have the soundcloud files demonstrating MBC, you add one demonstrating what a person with hearing loss would hear, before the one with the MBC. That way a person can judge the improvement that MBC gives to a person with hearing loss, instead of just judging the reduction of quality to that of a person with perfect hearing. But again, excellent article!
tempodox 12y ago
Why is this post on top?
danielsamuels 12y ago
I really wish this app was available on OS X, I would very happily pay for it and use it every day.
alphabetsoup 12y ago
the music world already uses copious amounts of multiband compression, as if all listeners have hearing loss
itgoon 12y ago
Could you add a "hearing test" to your app, which does at least rudimentary tuning? Call it "headphone calibration" and I bet you'd improve the listening experience of people who don't know they are hearing impaired.
eccstartup 12y ago
There is a drift in the soundcloud audio. Audio goes ahead of visual wave. So I missed the last visual beep in both compresses and uncompressed version.

545 points by varunsrin 12y ago

This was an interesting read, but what to me personally is more interesting is how to prevent hearing loss over the years. I might be wrong on this, but I recall a hearing specialist advising me not to use earbuds at all, or at least limit the use to max 1 hour at a time. A dynamic headphones, such as the good old Superlux HD 681 would be "better" in the long term. (Not trying to advertise for that headphone, it's just one of the few that is cheap, good, and I can rewire myself and even add a plug so I can easily buy new aux cables). However I cannot wear my headphone longer than 6 hours without it getting annoying. And running with a big headphone is a big no, but than again, I'm nowhere near to running longer than 30 minutes in a row. Anyone who has his own thoughts on this topic?

Symbiote 12y ago
I use earbuds, but I set the volume while I'm somewhere quiet. If the underground train is drowning out the music, so be it. I've also used reusable earplugs (I spent about £15) for all gigs, nightclubs etc. Sometimes I use them in noisy pubs. > However I cannot wear my headphone longer than 6 hours without it getting annoying. That's a really long time. Wouldn't it be best to reduce it? The main charity for deaf people in the UK, which seems to have renamed itself from the "Royal National Institute for the Deaf" to "Action on Hearing Loss", has a campaign called [Don't lose the music](http://www.dontlosethemusic.org.uk/ http://www.dontlosethemusic.org.uk/).
- larrybolt 12y ago
  I don't often go to clubs or places in general with loud music, but I play music trough earbuds/headphones to shut out distracting noises around me. And I guess to get "in the zone". I'm going to look up if there would be earplugs that could help me with that. And 6 hours is seldom, it's the max, but average I do go above the suggested 1 hour.
dsr_ 12y ago
If your ears hurt or are annoyed, stop. Quiet is better than loud. The more sound isolation your phones provide from the outside world, the quieter you can play your music and enjoy it. If you're sitting with headphones on for six hours, maybe you should get up a few times.
- larrybolt 12y ago
  > If your ears hurt or are annoyed, stop. I'd say it's more from the pushing on the sides of my head, not so much from the volume of the music. But you are right, and I have been thinking about stopping listening to music trough headphones when working, and use speakers. > If you're sitting with headphones on for six hours, maybe you should get up a few times. I have to say that my current working desk and rhythm is pretty much perfect as far as I know. My eyes never get tired, the screens are a good distance away from me, and I don't have to look down. I have a decent computer chair, and I take breaks about every hour, to go outside or get a new cup of coffee (but I do that with my headphones/earbuds in). Heck, no employee can offer a better working situation if you ask me, I'm all for the working remote - office not required-idea! :P
Anechoic 12y ago
I might be wrong on this, but I recall a hearing specialist advising me not to use earbuds at all, or at least limit the use to max 1 hour at a time. The issue isn't necessarily about all "earbuds," the issue is that many earbuds (including the ones included with Apple iOS products) don't seal the ear canal very well, so a listener is exposed to outside sounds in addition to sounds from the player. Since the outside sounds have a tendency to mask the sounds coming from the earbuds, the listener will often turn up the volume to better hear the audio material and therefore be exposed to SPL's that can cause hearing damage over long exposure times. The advice to use something like the Superlux HD 681 is that circumaural headphones offer some (not a lot, but some) shielding from outside noise, so a user won't be tempted to increase the volume level as much. Active noise canceling headsets and in-ear-monitors (like Etymotics-brand) provide better sound isolation so that users can keep the volume at more moderate levels.
- deleted 12y ago
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- pierrec 12y ago
  >the issue is that many earbuds don't seal the ear canal very well For those wondering which earbuds do provide decent isolation, there are, as you stated, the pretty expensive "in-ear-monitors", but you can also go for cheaper earbuds based on isolating memory foam like the JVC marshmallows, which are pretty cheap and provide decent isolation.
- im3w1l 12y ago
  For really high noise environments, like airplanes, I like using 30db dampening earplugs and then circumaural heaphones over them.
- bashinator 12y ago
  Exactly. With my Etymotics in-canal buds, I can set the volume on my music player to about 25-30%. With the stock buds or even non-isolating over-the-ear headphones, the same subjective loudness requires about 60-75% on the volume control.
varunsrin 12y ago
OP here. Some argue that in-ear earbuds send more high frequency energy directly into the ear than headphones, so the balance of sound is always tilted towards the highs, which over time can cause more high-frequency loss (low frequency loss is fairly uncommon). The difference between headphones and earbuds is likely minor - the volume you set your music to probably has a much greater impact. Get a pair with good isolation or cancellation, so you can keep the music volume lower. One thing that works really well for preserving your hearing is taking breaks - this is especially true of loud concerts (step out for a bathroom break once an hour), but also holds true if you're going to listen to headphones at high volumes for many hours straight.
hoggle 12y ago
Be aware that many prescription medications are ototoxic (e.g. Aspirin). I recently had a routine check-up of my hearing and at 31 my actual "hearing age" is supposedly 66 for higher frequencies - permanent hearing loss most likely brought on by Wellbutrin which I took for some weeks only (I've never been exposed to loud noises and never was much of a headphones user). Just putting it out there, be wary with prescriptions of Wellbutrin especially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ototoxicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ototoxicity
rtpg 12y ago
I remember with a pair of earbuds getting a little informational thing on the correct volume. Their rule of thumb is if you are incapable of hearing and understanding what people are telling you without taking out your earbuds, they're too loud. I tried this out, and found that I'm actually fine with the volume bar being maybe 30% of what I used to. Basically, put your earbuds in, play some music, and try to talk to someone. If you're unable to then you might be playing your music way too loud. (For people using earbuds to drown workplace noise out, I'd suggest an ambient noise program like noiz.io. You can train your brain to filter ambient background noise, and its better than trying to 1-up the sounds in your office)
- randlet 12y ago
  "incapable of hearing and understanding what people are telling you without taking out your earbuds" High quality isolating earbuds should make it pretty difficult to tell what other people are saying even with no music playing! Moving to a mid-range pair of Etymotic noise isolating earbuds was an absolute revelation for me and allowed me to use significantly lower volumes when listening to music. I can't recommend high quality isolating headphones/earbuds enough.
WalterBright 12y ago
I've lost hearing in my left ear, and I'm pretty sure it's due to years of driving with the window down.
enneff 12y ago
I wear good quality noise cancelling headphones with the music turned quite low. I feel like this is doing a lot to preserve my hearing.
ddingus 12y ago
In addition to poor isolation noted here, many cheap-o earbuds have a horrible response curve. They deliver way too much sound in narrow frequency ranges, usually the mid-range, say 1-4Khz, while not enough in the bass, and it's a mixed bag higher up through 10Khz+ People will turn it up, until they are hearing everything, and they do very significant damage to those "hot spot" frequency ranges, despite the overall perception of volume seeming reasonable to them. Add overly compressed music, and or crappy audio output, and the need to drive it loud happens to nearly everybody. There will be a whole generation of people, some who we are already seeing struggle with this, requiring adaptive sound options more early in life than is typical.

adamnemecek 12y ago

I might be wrong here but isn't what you call "dynamic range" usually referred to as "hearing range"? Dynamic range has a bit different connotation AFAIK.

afandian 12y ago
I think that the first use of "dynamic range" is clumsily worded. > Dynamic range is the range of frequencies and volumes that are audible to the human ear But reading on, it looks like it is used in the correct sense albeit it a specialised one. The article discusses dynamic ranges per frequency. Talking about multi-band compression confirms that.
baddox 12y ago
A lot of the concepts in this article appear to be deliberately simplified and terminology deliberately abused, and I would argue too much so. Take this paragraph for instance: > As you look at the waveform, the problem should become apparent. Sound is a 3-dimensional construct, but we can only represent 2 dimensions on a textbook or a monitor. In the waveform representation, we see Time on the x-axis plotted against Volume on the y-axis. The two axes in most waveform plots are sound pressure and time, not volume and time. The fact that the waveform depicted is nearly symmetrical reflected across the x axis should hint that this is the case.

zenocon 12y ago

"Why can't I just turn up the volume on my iPhone?" is something I ask myself everyday and shake my fist toward Cupertino. Seriously, the gain on the phone is severely limited. Try listening to a voice call on speakerphone in even a moderately quiet environment with just a twee bit of ambient noise. It is maddening that I can't get any more volume out of this device without jailbreaking it.

darklajid 12y ago
I'm not trying to pull your leg here, but .. why would you try to use the speaker if there's noise around you? I mean, why wouldn't you - like - put it up against your ear instead?
- TallGuyShort 12y ago
  I do it all the time in mildly noisy environments: - Impromptu "conference call" with a colleague physically next to you and another one remote. - Need to be typing to take minutes, retrieve information relevant to the call, etc. - Too many calls already and arm is tired of holding the phone and listening.
- ics 12y ago
  Any scenario where you'd want to use the speaker phone has little to do with noise. Sometimes I want it while driving because I don't have a headset (and don't plan on getting one, since I don't own a car and drive rarely). Or in the shop while drilling, soldering, or whatever. Or outside working on something. It's about using the phone while doing something else, often something that you couldn't do with something blocking one ear or dangling anything from your head. Then of course there's the case where multiple people are listening/speaking through the same phone.
  - soperj 12y ago
    Seriously.. just don't talk while driving. It's dangerous for everyone.

a2kadet 12y ago

> "Sound expresses itself in three dimensions: time (seconds), volume (decibels) and frequency (Hertz)." Is anyone else as irked about the authors choice of the word dimensions as much as I am? I can't read past it. Wouldn't "factors" be a better fit?

sls 12y ago
Seemed natural to me, dimensions in a phase space.
jeremysmyth 12y ago
No. "Dimensions" is the right word, because they are three orthogonal scales along which musical notes can be measured[1]. The author could also have suggested timbre and other possible dimensions, but the three stated apply to all sound, including (importantly) sine waves, the simplest type of sound. [1] Technically, frequency is a function of time too (and timbre a function of the interaction of multiple frequencies and envelope changes, another function of time) but these are all independent uses of time.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Technically there are two complementary sets of dimensions: time and amplitude vs frequency and phase. Both are complete encodings of the waveform. The article is extremely muddled from a technical point of view. When dealing with perceptions it is extremely important to distinguish physics and physiology. In optics we have radiometric (physical) vs photometric (perceived) values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometry_%28optics%29#Photometric_versus_radiometric_quantities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photometry_%28optics%29#Photom... It appears in the article they are doing some kind of implicit averaging over the ear's response function at each frequency, which may make sense in terms of perceptions but makes very little sense in terms of physics. A much better visual analog would be a blurred photograph rather than a cropped one. "Turning up the volume" simply increases the brightness of the images, which doesn't do a damned thing to reduce the blurring. One thing that people with normal hearing don't get is how much information is in the high frequencies, which are where the most loss normally occurs, although there are also "notch" losses that happen to people whose ears are routinely subject to loud noises in narrow bands. We tend to think of "high frequency" sounds in terms of single notes, but in speech the high frequencies are most important in the unvoiced constants, the "s" and "th" sounds and similar. Losing the high frequencies blurs the edges of speech, often making the shape of it unrecognizable. Frequency-dependent enhancement sharpens the edges and brings it back into useful focus.

korethr 12y ago

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 his hearing loss better than just constantly buying batteries. However, I do have one complaint with the article, and that's their (mis)use of terminology, specifically, dynamic range. Dynamic range is not, as they claim, the range of frequencies one can hear, from lowest to highest (e.g. 20Hz-20kHz). That's bandwidth. What dynamic range is, is the ratio of quietest to loudest sounds possible, often expressed in dB.[1] For example, as they mention, human hearing has about 120dB of dynamic range. An audio CD can encode a dynamic range of 96dB. The 24-bit files professional audio studios work with can represent up to 144dB of dynamic range. Perhaps it's a pedantic distinction, but using already existing terms for what you mean to say is less likely to cause confusion than misusing one that means something else. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range

Stratoscope 12y ago
You're not being pedantic at all. It's a fairly egregious error for an article about hearing. It would be like an article about a camera talking about its fast f/1.4 shutter speed.
- bigiain 12y ago
  Curiously, that sort of language is used by camera people. Aperture and shutter speed are not the same thing, but they are inextricably linked to each other (in a way that dynamic range (in the amplitude sense) and frequency response/range are not nearly so linked). In a "camera article", the phrase " ... its fast f/1.4 shutter speed." would probably be in the context of saying something about one or more of the sensor's size, sensitivity, or noise-floor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_speed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_speed "Lens speed refers to the maximum aperture diameter, or minimum f-number, of a photographic lens. A lens with a larger maximum aperture (that is, a smaller minimum f-number) is called a "fast lens" because it delivers more light intensity (illuminance) to the focal plane, achieving the same exposure with a faster shutter speed."

s0rce 12y ago

Spatial frequencies in the image might have been a much better analogy instead of simply cropping the image size.

anigbrowl 12y ago

What’s the solution? Multi-Band Compression (MBC), a technique that’s been used by the $6 billion hearing aid industry to solve this specific problem. An MBC uses intelligent design instead of a one-size-fits-all method. With the right data about your hearing pattern, it can mash the full sound into your range so that you get all the information you need. Audio engineer here. That is patently untrue. MBC is a super-useful technique and is indeed helpful for mitigating hearing loss in relatively transparent fashion, but it does not and cannot bring sounds from outside someone's audible hearing range back within it. It will dynamically rebalance incoming audio in inverse proportion to the degree of hearing loss within a set of frequency ranges, but many kinds of sensorineural hearing loss involve the death of cilia cells (the tiny hairs thatvibrate at particular frequencies, much like the bins of of an FFT) which can result in a total loss of perception at or above certain frequencies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorineural_hearing_loss http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorineural_hearing_loss To 'mash the full sound into your range' requires a technique known as frequency shifting, but that's problematic because it destroys the harmonic relationships of the incoming material and sounds disorienting, at best. In any case, I think the illustration of the bear on the tricycle is absurdly simplistic and makes me wonder to what the degree the pp designers really grasp the underlying concept. A much more appropriate parallel would have been to show an image with a severe Gaussian blur, which more closely parallels the actual experience of hearing loss in terms of both empirical measurement (higher frequencies tend to be more severely attenuated in cases of induced hearing loss) and subjective experience (blurring hinders edge detection, which is analogous to transient detection in audio, and which has a large role in speech intelligibility. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur If you're struggling with hearing loss, then you should really, really consult an audiologist, work out the basis of your hearing loss (which is sometimes as simple as impacted earwax), and work out a treatment strategy. If you're suffering from degenerative hearing loss then listening to overly-compressed music could actually accelerate it, and listening on headphones or earbuds (many of which bias the sound for increased impact) could also contribute to the problem. It's a truism in the pro audio world that most people are awful at self-measurement and tend to over-equalize in the absence of proper experimental control protocols. I apologize for the rather negative tone of the post; I appreciate the people at SoundFocus are trying to provide people with something useful and helpful at minimal cost, by leveraging the pretty good audio hardware in their phone. However, hearing loss tends to be a one-way thing, and I think that offering a product to that market without a clinician on the team is a bad idea. There's a lot more to being an 'audio ninja' than understanding the fundamentals of DSP.

pizza 12y ago

This article would be great if they replaced their frequency-domain 'dynamic range' terminology with the standard word for it, bandwidth.

korethr 12y ago
Thank you. This was the word I was looking for, but escaped me when I wrote my own commment.

dghughes 12y ago

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 non-verbal sounds is noise that obscures all words to her. "What?" is the response to nearly every word from anyone mouth has to be repeated twice except in a dead silent room. She listens to the TV on level 20 and it's very draining to everyone around the person. But she won't get a hearing aid! She's 70 years-old but refuses to even discuss it. It's odd how if you say to a person who can't see they may need glasses it's OK but if you say to a person hard of hearing the may need a hearing aid it's like you said the most obnoxious thing ever to say to anyone.

codezero 12y ago
I bet you'd find a lot of older people also unwilling to get new glasses or a stronger prescription. All the same, the taboo likely exists because it's common for young people to have myopia, but not poor hearing, so it's always OK to have glasses and never OK to need hearing augmentation. I really hope this taboo goes away as new generations get more and more comfortable with augmenting their senses.
72deluxe 12y ago
"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.
- dghughes 12y ago
  I would have to ask my dad but I know when I am there I swear it's every time I say something except in an incredibly quiet room so tracking isn't necessary since it always occurs from my perspective. 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.

Scaevolus 12y ago

A spectrogram would show what MBC is doing far more directly than the waveform plots.

carlob 12y ago

I once went to a 3h long blackboard talk given by James Hudspeth [1] on the physics of hearing. It was one of the most fascinating things I've ever heard: it turns out that not only the cochlea performs a Fourier transform of the sounds we're hearing, but it can also selectively amplify some frequencies, by vibrating the very same hair that detect the sounds. Sometimes the mechanism that amplifies some sounds goes wrong and that's why sometimes old dogs seem to emit a high pitched sound from their ears, and also the cause of some forms of tinnitus. If you have some time to kill do go read the wikipedia pages of the cochlea and hair cells, it's really fascinating stuff! [1] http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/labheads/JamesHudspeth/ http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/labheads/JamesHu...

HCIdivision17 12y ago
I have always wondered if that high pitched sound was real! No one else heard it, and it makes so little sense I always figured it was my hearing.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Do you hear that high-pitched sound all the time? That's tinnitus. Or do you only hear it from dogs?
  - HCIdivision17 12y ago
    It turns out I have really decent hearing. So it's unlikely to be tinnitus; at worst I have a sort of hearing after-image when a tonal frequency suddenly cuts out (and now I'm guessing that's an effect of the ear actively filtering - I can't wait to watch that video). But yeah, I did hear it on the dog. It's so anomalous to hear a high pitched noise coming from an ear that I was willing to question my own hearing/sanity. The best I could manage to guess was that there was some sort of small gas pocket leaking, which made a little bit of sense since my dog (samoyed) had a bubble on his ear (that eventually gave him a sadly adorable floppy ear when it eventually drained - prolly an aural hematoma); the bump never actually seemed to deflate due to the noise, though. At the time I was an early teen just sort of beginning to learn analytical techniques, so that reasoning was the best I could muster. These days I tend to trust/understand my senses more.

marquis 12y ago

While I appreciate the article, having hearing loss is not like losing context of an image such as not being able to see the bear on the tricycle. It's more like the image is fuzzy and depending on the factor of loss, it might be a bear or it might just be some fuzz: http://i.imgur.com/vKn7oTf.png http://i.imgur.com/vKn7oTf.png Audio compression, especially when using psychoacoustic principles, helps by lowering the noise of the unwanted sounds e.g "probably not a human voice" or "not a bear" in this case and increasing certain frequencies for a person's particular hearing range so they can "see" the image better.

dghughes 12y ago
I'd agree the fuzzy analogy is better since a hearing impaired person may think they understand but they don't, sometimes totally wrong. I recall reading that vowels are easier to hear than consonants or maybe it is vice versa? "Hello how are you today" may seem like "Hll hw r tdy" which to the hearing impaired person may seem like "How am I tidy?" or something totally incomprehensible but their brain makes up something close (incorrectly) by filling in the blanks. The Monty Python sketch "I'd like to buy a hearing aid" feels like what I go through daily when trying to communicate with my mother. I showed it to my mother thought it was funny, sometimes when she thinks she knows what I said but it's not even close it's like the sketch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7UqhDs8zj4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7UqhDs8zj4
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

roberthahn 12y ago

Interesting article. Thanks for posting, varunsrin! I've been following development of SoundFocus for awhile. I'm profoundly deaf. This is a technical term classifying the degree of hearing loss; to give you a sense of where this fits, the typical classification range is mild, moderate, severe, profound, total. Between a combination of hearing aids and lip-reading, I've done a reasonable job of integrating into a hearing society. Not perfect, but ok. I've often wished for a different approach to correcting hearing. It crystallized for me after I read this article by Jon Udell: http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-you-talk-to-a-person-with-hearing-loss/ http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-y... In that article, what Jon found was that his mom would hear best if you spoke at a low to medium volume close to her ear - this worked better than any shouting at a greater distance could accomplish. And it should be easy for you to simulate - get a friend to talk to you from 50' away - you can still hear them, but there's some detail loss that wouldn't happen if they're 3' away. I still benefit - a lot - from MBC, but if someone could come up with a way to make the incoming sound sound as if it were right beside me, man, that would really help me understand people clearly. One non-technical solution, that people use to ensure that deaf people can understand you clearly is to enunciate consonants audibly. An example of this is is the word "red" - it becomes "erREDdead". I don't know if there's a name for this so I can't point you to a page describing how to extra-enunciate all the letters. As useful as it is, people speaking to me like that always makes me feel like I'm dumb, because they sound dumb saying it. Clearly I have issues :-)

72deluxe 12y ago
I don't think you have issues. I wonder if they sound dumb because of the difference to "normal" speech, where we typically say words in a daft manner to young children or those learning to speak? We associate them with reduced capabilities (in a sense) because they are children and are still learning. That isn't meant offensively, more that we know the child needs to learn? But if it helps you hear, I think it's great! That article you linked to was interesting. Thanks.

dlandis 12y ago

> If you know people who have hearing loss, you’ve noticed that they can’t tolerate loud noises that you’re fine with, but they also can’t hear some of things that you can hear perfectly well. So what is the explanation of why they can't tolerate certain loud noises? I feel like the article was going to address that aspect of hearing loss as well but never did.

cheng1 12y ago
Hearing is an range. So they have reduced range on both side.
- dlandis 12y ago
  Hmm, I'm not sure you understand it any better than I do. The article says: >Well, if you get hearing damage at a specific frequency, you’ll start to lose sensitivity to the quiet sounds at this frequency. However, your sensitivity to loud sounds remains the same. If their sensitivity to loud sounds remained the same on the one hand, why would they be unable to tolerate certain sounds on the other hand. Seems contradictory.
  - ddingus 12y ago
    Over time, the ear loses it's ability to carry very loud sounds through all the stages needed for sensation. This manifests in two basic ways: 1. Fatigue. That pop music, "wall of loud sound" album was tolerable for a few hours at age 20, gets tiresome at 40, and could be almost painful at age 60. Hearing is a mechanical process, and worn out mechanical parts tend to rattle, lose response, etc... and this is fatigue. People will respond with something like, "I'm tired of hearing", and to them, the experience of hearing is no longer transparent at higher volumes and longer times. 2. Less dynamic range possible / pain Think of it like gamma for displays. There is a curve of sensation to input sound in db. People tend to vary a lot, but this curve gets bent away from the normal to a condition that is a lot like "crushed black" and white, where the upper limit of sound volume perception gets distorted. An unimpaired person can tell the difference between 60, 80, 100db. People who have aged and have losses, may not be able to tell much difference between those volume levels, resulting in "all loud sounds are just loud" not different amounts of loud. Also think of banding when color depth is reduced. Rather than a nice, smooth response, the listener gets more steps, or various steps may all present in ways that are similar when they should be easily distinguished. A related thing is discrimination, and it happens with pitch in the same way that it can happen with volume. Loss of pitch discrimination means being unable to distinguish between close frequencies, hearing them as one, or perhaps just as a muddled combination, not as two distinct tones. This is subtle, and it can happen with most other responses being normal. But the person just can't quite pick out the sounds, despite hearing them individually just fine. It's the combinations they struggle with.

gwern 12y ago

For people with hearing loss & run Linux: if you have your audiogram and an idea how your hearing loss varies by frequency, you can try to do selective boosts by frequency through a Pulseaudio filter. I discuss it a bit in https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/32qSkcQPbmQ https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/32qSkcQP...

randlet 12y ago
Nice! Thanks a lot for the link and writing that up!
jkot 12y ago
Thank you! This is pretty usefull for testing on grandma ☺

cheng1 12y ago

So it's like a CPU can't process fast enough and start to losing signals. Just like the choppy adobe flash player on OSX!

Jemaclus 12y ago

I'm completely deaf in my left ear, and I wear a hearing aid in my right ear. What's really cool is that my hearing aid has BlueTooth, and starting with the iPhone 5S, Apple supports direct-to-hearing-aid technology. That means when I get a phone call, it streams directly from the phone to my hearing aid -- not out of a speaker, directly to my ear. Very, very cool. Here's more info: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/hearing-aids/ https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/hearing-aids/ That said, if I had an older hearing aid or didn't have this one, I'd definitely use this app. They are spot on about hearing loss and how it's more than just a volume thing. In fact, most of hearing loss is really an understanding thing. I can hear your voice just fine -- I just can't hear 100% of it, so the words don't make sense to me right away.

sandworm 12y ago

I wish people would put half the effort into prevention that this article puts into mitigation. Work beside a machine humming at a particular frequency and you will loose that frequency even if the sound doesn't seem loud at the time. And simply jambing in a pair of earplugs doesn't make you immune. They have limits.

deleted 12y ago

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soj 12y ago

Hi folks, In order to summarize what I've read so far: This promotion article about SoundFocus is clearly not written with help of a professional from within the hearing aid industry nor from someone with clinical experience. The author shows to be good with language, probably an engineer who makes links with technical terms as if he knows what he is talking about. I find this article very misleading and not a help for the hearing disabled or their relatives. It reminds me of a very useful course I once followed:'physiology of the ear for physicists'. It would be good if the author or developers find something similar. I realize that my post breaths some arrogance and of course it is easy to burn something down. But yes, I know better. And yes, I could have written this article that would market SoundFocus properly (in a similar style if you like) with only useful and correct information. Maybe I should... ? Cheers -a professional-

soj 12y ago
My bro points out I did not mention a single flaw/example. (I am busy enough as it is) Besides things already mentioned by others, talking about dead regions, upwards spread of masking perhaps temporal scatter and tuning curves would have made it a lot more juicy. One flaw: time and volume are NOT self explanatory. Think about recruitment and such. Another flaw: multi-band compression is not doing what is suggested by the picture of the bear where the bicycle is missing. This visual example fits much better to a person with a dead region for whom frequency compression is applied. And this is not a one-size-fits-all method. Different techniques are available for this particular phenomenon (as there is frequency shifting as well). Anyway... let's mention a positive side. I appreciate the attempt of communicating on the topic and it was a good try to make things clearer for some. Better luck next time. Happy bro?

shreyas056 12y ago

tl;dr "hearing loss is caused by uneven or abnormal frequency response of ear compared to that of normal human"

kabouseng 12y ago

My wife is an audiologist, and she and her colleagues found this excellent. One suggestion if I may (actually that my wife made), is that where you have the soundcloud files demonstrating MBC, you add one demonstrating what a person with hearing loss would hear, before the one with the MBC. That way a person can judge the improvement that MBC gives to a person with hearing loss, instead of just judging the reduction of quality to that of a person with perfect hearing. But again, excellent article!

tempodox 12y ago

Why is this post on top?

danielsamuels 12y ago

I really wish this app was available on OS X, I would very happily pay for it and use it every day.

alphabetsoup 12y ago

the music world already uses copious amounts of multiband compression, as if all listeners have hearing loss

itgoon 12y ago

Could you add a "hearing test" to your app, which does at least rudimentary tuning? Call it "headphone calibration" and I bet you'd improve the listening experience of people who don't know they are hearing impaired.

eccstartup 12y ago

There is a drift in the soundcloud audio. Audio goes ahead of visual wave. So I missed the last visual beep in both compresses and uncompressed version.