This is nifty.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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]<p>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.<p>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.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range</a>
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, <i>directly</i> to my ear. Very, very cool.<p>Here's more info: <a href="https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/hearing-aids/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/hearing-aids/</a><p>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 <i>understanding</i> 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.
I once went to a 3h long blackboard talk given by James Hudspeth [1] on the physics of hearing.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If you have some time to kill do go read the wikipedia pages of the cochlea and hair cells, it's really fascinating stuff!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/labheads/JamesHudspeth/" rel="nofollow">http://www.rockefeller.edu/research/faculty/labheads/JamesHu...</a>
Interesting article. Thanks for posting, varunsrin! I've been following development of SoundFocus for awhile.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I've often wished for a different approach to correcting hearing. It crystallized for me after I read this article by Jon Udell: <a href="http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-you-talk-to-a-person-with-hearing-loss/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.jonudell.net/2014/12/09/why-shouting-wont-help-y...</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 :-)
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.<p>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.<p>But again, excellent article!
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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 <a href="https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/32qSkcQPbmQ" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/32qSkcQP...</a>
"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.
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:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/vKn7oTf.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/vKn7oTf.png</a><p>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.
<i>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.<p>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.</i><p>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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorineural_hearing_loss" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensorineural_hearing_loss</a><p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_blur</a><p>If you're struggling with hearing loss, then you should really, <i>really</i> 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 <i>awful</i> at self-measurement and tend to over-equalize in the absence of proper experimental control protocols.<p>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.
This was an interesting read, but what to me personally is more interesting is how to prevent hearing loss over the years.<p>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).<p>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.<p>Anyone who has his own thoughts on this topic?
Hi folks,<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Maybe I should... ?<p>Cheers
-a professional-
I wish people would put half the effort into prevention that this article puts into mitigation.<p>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.
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.
> 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.<p>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.
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.
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.
> "Sound expresses itself in three dimensions: time (seconds), volume (decibels) and frequency (Hertz)."<p>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?