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.<p>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.<p>Rather irritating explaining this to people.
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.<p>I have not confirmed this speculation with an audiologist, so I would love comments on this from someone who works on hearing-aid software.
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)
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.<p>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?
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?<p>And no one's going to actually figure out treatment, because there's no money in it.
Now this is a real hacker post! Kudos to the author.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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 [redacted] if you wanna discuss the topic in more depth (i designed some algorithms for hearing aids)
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.
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... .
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.<p>In addition to my normal hearing loss, I sometimes have trouble with this in one ear. Fortunately it has always gone away, so far.<p>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?
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?
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.<p>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.<p>I recently installed VoiceMeter Banana on my PC and I can use it to do the same thing. It really can help!
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!<p>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?
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.