Do We Really Need Hearing Aids?

Interesting idea. I never really thought about it before, but, with all of the vowels the mouth is open, allowing the sound waves to reach the recipients ear unimpeded, whereas consonants require the mouth or teeth to be closed at some point, deflecting the sound waves.

It seems that it would take a pretty specialized hearing aid though. It would take some kind of computer program to differentiate the consonants in real time and amplify them.

My neighbor that visits every afternoon is HOH, and I'm probably in the early stages........we just yell at each other.

I, too am old as dirt and HOH. I find that my wife has begun to mumble more and more as she ages.

I find that such words as can't; why don't you; pick it up; and any number of commands have been transmuted by her jaws over the years so that I can barely understand any of her commands any more.

She still seems to enunciate some words such as time to eat; want another beer; the race has started and I'll go shopping without you in the same manner as she did when she was 30.

You may be on to something, I don't know.

Good Luck.

You've got yourself a keeper there! At least the words and phrases that the poor thing is still able to enunciate are very helpful.

I hope she doesn't have access to your CR4 musings. I'll bet she's not too old to make you wish you were never born.

Yes we do really need hearing aids;

Starting from infancy, the major cause for a child to be dumb as has been confirmed by ENT specialists is that if a child has hearing difficulties, and since the child initially must try to repeat what he or she hears, difficulty in hearing of that child causes permanent speech loss (dumb) which is not curable at a later stage although the vocal cords are normal.

Hearing Aid is essentially required for that child to be be able to listen and than try to repeat what he or she hears, to be able to speak at all.

At a later stage, normal people like you and me when encountered with hearing problems, rather to have reinforcement at the right time (Like lens for the Eye) somehow prefer to depend on guess work or lip reading and therefore further degradation of hearing is rapid.

From your posts (others included) I can guess that it is a bit late now, but still there is a hope that if you visit your ENT specialist and the speech therapist (as the case may be) improvements would be there, A Hearing Aid is synonymous to Eye Glasses you are readily wearing.

But what if you do not agree with my philosophy; in that case stop fancying about a Hi Fi device, keep a copy pencil or tablet handy to be able to communicate.

Was this you?

An old man decided his old wife was getting hard of hearing.

So he called her doctor to make an appointment to have her hearing checked.

The Doctor said he could see her in two weeks, and meanwhile there's a
simple, informal test the husband could do to give the doctor some idea
of the dimensions of the problem.

"Here's what you do. Start about 40 feet away from her, and speak in
a normal conversational tone and see if she hears you. If not, go to 30
feet, then 20 feet, and so on until you get a response."

So that evening she's in the kitchen cooking dinner, and he's in the
living room, and he says to himself,
"I'm about 40 feet away, let's see what happens."

"Honey, what's for supper?" No response.

So he moves to the other end of the room, about 30 feet away.
"Honey, what's for supper?" No response.

So he moves into the dining room, about 20 feet away.
"Honey, what's for supper?" No response.

On to the kitchen door, only 10 feet away.
"Honey, what's for supper?". No response.

So he walks right up behind her.
"Honey, what's for supper?"

"For the FIFTH time, CHICKEN!!!!"

Not me, I don't like chicken.

My wife and I relate to this tale and love it.

A very interesting subject. The answer is hearing aids do not cost thousands of £'s or $'s, its a rip off. Fortunately here in the Uk they are free on the NHS. Digital behind the ear units, made I believe or at least designed in Denmark, which is I believe the European centre of hearing aid technology. I hope we get some informed contributions to this discussion as pressure has bought the cost of these items down dramatically in the last 2/3 years as the UK NHS went digital the high street hearing aid suppliers have reduced the prices by 2/3rds. If you are in the UK go to your doctor and ask to be refered to your nearest audiolgy hospital. If you are in Europe go to Denmark, they are less expensive there.

Oliver Dunthorne

Shhh, don't tell the Americans, they hate this sort of socialist health care. It only encourages poor people to go deaf so they'll get a free hearing aid.

Not to nitpick, but they are not free. Someone is paying for them. You may not be paying directly out of your pocket. But if you are employed, it's likely your taxes are paying for them, if not, someone is still paying for them.

Whether your musings are correct or not, you seem to be suggesting a hearing aid, albeit a variation of those currently available.

So why use the thread title you've used?

(as an aside - it's very much easier to read a post if it's broken into paragraphs - maybe that's difficult with your browser, but it shouldn't be that hard. Ask Garthh nicely - he knows about this stuff).

(as another aside - I hope this isn't the start of a 'pitch').

No, this is a way in which to correct for the shortcoming of human speech itself. You see the vowels can be ear shatteringly loud, e.g. babies crying, sopranos at high volume. The consonants are by comparison extremely quiet. Try screaming the consonant sounds, B, C, and D for example without the assistance of any vowel. Couldn't hear you in the room next door. Vowels have been with us since the beginnings of animal life, more than 2.5 million years. Only animals having the sound making ability, the vocal chords, survived the evolutionary process. Sound making was key to survival. For the animal world it still remains the key to its survival. Human voice speech began comparatively recently by comparison to the first language, some 20-30,000 years ago, by the introduction of noises added to the already vocal cries, in a code-like fashion. It represents a new-comer compared to the first vocal chord language. It is even conceivable that the first human word was "mama", since at the instant of birth, the baby cries-a vowel sound. The second sound it makes is the sucking sound-a consonant. Put together the two basic sounds of humanity are found in "mama". And it is likely that the mother who just gave birth recognized this. If TV and radio stations would increase the volume of the consonants only, HOH ers might understand as well as normal hearing persons.Thus no need for hearing aids.

While I have broken down my thread into easily readable paragraphs, CR4 seems to reformat it into one glob. I agree with your idea of breaking it into paragraphs, that is just plain good writing.

I'd be interested in any references you have for the consonants and vowels. My wife is in need of a hearing aid. Due to talking with her about it and thinking about it and I have recognized that when my right ear is covered (on a pillow) it is a bit more difficult for me to understand some people on TV (Morgan Freeman in his latest Science Channel special is the worst so far). My right ear is still good so until a few weeks ago I never had a clue about how people could state that they can hear but they can't understand. I have now experienced the problem with my left ear, but I don't really understand it.

My wife is having trouble understanding people so an investment in a hearing aid is coming soon.

I'm also hoping to understand how it can cost $5,000 for a hearing aid. I know that they must be very efficient electrically to run on a battery. They must be small, light and probably somewhat tailored in their frequency response. Preventing feedback is not trivial, but once the NRE is spent designing it in the incremental cost per unit should be minimal. With millions of people buying hearing aids it seems like the hearing aid is probably $150 with $4850 going to the profits of a controlled access market chain.

Bruce

When I first recognized my own loss of hearing, I found that I was not able to distinguish consonants. Rat, fat, cat, mat, were all mish-mash, because these quiet consonants could not be distinguished from one another. Went shopping on the internet for a hearing aid that advertised "consonants amplified". Nothing existed. Ended up buying a behind the ear Siemens hearing aid which is as good as is now available. Paid about $1650... Its OK as any presently available. I use just one aid and use it on the better hearing ear. Suggest using Costco as a good place to buy a hearing aid and at a fair price. Bought my Siemen's hearing aid on the internet at Audiometrix at 1 800 820 8040. You might give them a call and talk to them. Since my background was electrical engineering and I worked in that field my entire career, it was easy to me to recognize the problem.( Let's just give the problem a name-like 'serial modulation'.) I would personally like to build a hearing device that fulfills the answer to what I see as the problem. Somehow an entire hearing aid industry fails to understand why users end up saying "I hear you but I don't understand you" I probably can't do it myself because I am so out of mainstream technology, being 90 y/o, so that I try to broadcast my seeming unique understanding of this problem in the hopes that other younger engineers would pick up on it to develop a better hearing device. The device is not a hearing aid as much as it is a device to correct the shortcomings of oral speech itself. For example,a radio or TV station broadcasting with amplified consonants would make speech itself more understandable for normal as well as the hearing impaired. In ordinary speech, vowel sounds are typically 10,000 time louder than consonants.

They will give away cell phones, but hearing aids cost $5,000. WTF?

Try Costco in Fort Lauderdale. Probably the best price and quality.

My neighbor has hearing aids in both ears and is always going in for adjustments, etc.

I also have a sister in law that used to work in one of those hearing centers........trust me it's a big racket.

I believe it's one of the biggest legitimized Medicare scams ever.

Nope. Medicare don't pay for them. The government prefers deaf people so they can't hear what's going on. I bought the $5k hearing aids but they were a real problem when I was on the phone. They would squeal even in the phone mode. Now they now need repair and a complete overhaul to each costs 250 bucks. Humm. I like my quiet world free of distractions.

Good one! I was wrong on that, but I do know that every 3 years or so they are trying to get my neighbor to upgrade, to the tune of almost $4000, every time, and they want his old ones back.

Rather than calling it a racket, it is more a case of the that business trying to solve the wrong problem. Yes, our hearing frequency range diminishes at the higher frequencies as we age. But the problem has to do with hearing both parts of basic speech, the consonants and the vowels. The consonants are weak from the manner in which they are formed (by mouth and tongue and lip shaping) and need amplification, the vowels are loud and don't need amplification. Try explaining that to your sister-in-law and maybe before too many years the hearing aid industry will start building consonant amplifiers. First one to do it will become might rich.

It is a racket. The prices for the products and services they do sell, are way, way higher than they need to be. The profit margins are astronomical.

The people in the hearing aid business are not doctors, but salesmen/women that wear white coats for effect.

We tend to think in terms of frequency because of Fourier series / transform. But the frequency domain is not always enough to deal with a signal.

Hifi amplifiers used to have a lot of negative feedback, the more the better. If you measure the frequency response slowly sweeping the input, you have a nice flat response. But your amp may have a poor transient response. The same applies to a bass-reflex speaker enclosure or even a pipe organ in a gothic church: a lot of reverberation, which can be nice for music (listening to a well-known sequence of sounds is cozy)but it's bad for speech inteligibility (information content is related to unexpectedness).

A Fourier transform yields a continuous frequency spectrum with bands. Only a perfectly periodic waveform will produce discrete frequencies. Those little hairs in our ears may resonate at given frequencies, but how do they react to a frequency band?

Steep waveforms do not translate so well with Fourier. A perfect square wave (zero rise and fall times) will not be correctly reproduced by the traditional sine series (residual ripple). Guess all in the group agree on the importance of Al's consonants. So what about the hair resonance? Have you ever seen one of those old analog (multireed) frequency meters swinging around 60 Hz after switching?

The neural sensors connected to the hairs are nonlinear by nature (remember neuristors?...). Frequency domain reasoning is normally based on linear assumptions.

What is known about the step response of hairs / nerves? Can't this "step response" (consonants) be affected by age in a different way as compared with the "steady state resonace" (vowels)?

It seems that mother language phonemes build up a sort of firmware in our brains while we start speaking. What happens with those bits as we age, especially in the case there is a language change during adult life?

brgds

Snel

Snel: Your message shows great knowledge of audio, Fourier transforms and its relation to the hearing problem. Excellent! However, the problem whose solution I am seeking lies in the basic formation of human speech, the two languages which were put together by our ancient paleolithic ancestors. One language 2.5 million years old which all surviving animals have in common and all derived from air passing over the vibrating membranes, the vocal chords. This output of the vocal chords is sinusoidal, thus would lend itself to filtering using the FFT and could be a fine methology for their being filtered out to leave in only the consonants. Consonants, unlike their partners in speech, the vowels, are defined as noises (albeit 'characteristic' noises) of unknown frequency and amplitude. The entire field of noise study remains a jungle of unknowns, with only a few bright spots defined such as 'white' noise. My entire wish would be to create a device for amplifying only the consonants in order to accomplish what natural development did not accomplish. This would require amplifying only the consonants. This consonant-amplifier device could then be used in audio applications, radio, TV, hearing aids, etc.. When used in radio or TV, the listening HOH person may regain his ability to distinguish speech as well as his non-HOH partner. Thus the provocative title to my original CR4 input,"Do we really need hearing aids?"

Best is to be selectively deaf. Only hear what you want to hear.

But that is another story

Maybe this "detection" works for you and that is good, but generalizing deafness is dangerous. If it works depends only on which resonant hairs are damaged. I had my father in law driving around in a bell truck to sell ice and exactly that range of his audio spectrum is 'gone'.

I don't know if this is off topic or not but some what relates to this thread so I thought I would offer a little humor on the subject at hand.

My Uncle Stanley (now deceased) was elderly (92 years young)and was having trouble caring for himself. Reluctantly my Dad had him placed in an assisted living facility close to where we lived.

Every Saturday morning Dad and I would go and visit Uncle Stanley. Each Saturday, we would find him in the day room with the other tenants. Most would be playing cards, sitting in groups chatting, watching TV, ect. Uncle Stanley would always be sitting alone in the corner by the window (with his back to the room) smoking his cigarettes (this was back in the late 70's).

Anyway, Dad and I would walk into the room and from right along side his wheel chair, my Dad would put his hand on Stanley's shoulder and say in a very loud voice (Stanley was very HOH and wanted nothing to do with a hearing aid "Those are for deaf people" he would always say) "Morning Stan, how you doing today". Stanley would look around rather bewildered and reply, Huh, what, who's that" He would look at us and say "Oh hi fellas".

This one Saturday, we came in as usual and went through the same routine. Upon my Dad saying loudly "Morning Stan, how you doing today". Without any pause, Stanley snapped around and yelled, "What the F**K are you shouting at me for".

This only happened on one occasion but boy you could have heard a pin drop in the day room that morning!

Selective hearing, I dunno????

My father, who as a Marine Engineer dealt with the care and fettling on screaming medium speed Marine Diesels(5 - 15000hp) throughout his career.

Now, that work environment has impacted on his hearing, it's been degrading gradually since his forties. At 78, He is now on his second set of high tech hearing aids as the first set could nolonger provide the definition he needed. The fear is of course that this latest set will not last him out. I suspect that they exascerbate the problem in some ways.

He already ignores the phone when it rings, as he can't converse with the caller. Fortunately mum's around to deal with "Mumbai Calling" but even so it's the degradation of his quality of life that is the concern.

Fortunately the Orchids he grows for his amusement aren't much for conversation, but the grand kids are...

It would be nice to think that there could be an alternate solution to repairing hearing loss. Though I think OP's solution may not be it...

There is a solution. Men in particular, go to the grave, swearing there's nothing wrong.

Spend a year, learn how to read lips and sign, and call it a day.

People that are born with hearing impediments simply adjust and move on.

Then there are those of us that insist that everything just needs to be louder and the world will be right.

When in a conversation with someone that was born deaf, all I have to remember is to face them while speaking. Quite simple really.

My hearing is getting worse, and my memory is getting worse too, but I remember your first post about this issue 2 years ago. Any progress since then?

Honored that you remembered my original post. Shows improved memory. My progress has been in better understanding the hearing problem and being able to explain it more convincingly. A multi billion dollar industry, the hearing aid manufacturers, and millions of dispensers, all built on the basis of a wrong concept. The main idea of not understanding for the HOH is not, emphasis on not, in the frequency diminishing as we age, but in the inability to hear the coding of speech. What do I mean by the 'coding of speech'? Human speech consists of two separate languages. The vowel language and the consonant language. These are teamed together like a Morse Code of dts and dah's. In speech we use consonant and vowels somewhat in the same manner. The HOH must hear both languages or there can be no understanding. What comes into play as we age and begin losing hearing, the consonant part can no longer be heard because it is thousands of times quieter than the vowels.

The problem is that consonants tend to have more high frequency content than vowels as well as being of shorter duration. Since hearing loss is usually greater at high frequencies this makes it hard to distinguish consonants. Hearing aids correct for the greater loss of high frequencies so they do in fact go a long way toward what you are suggesting.

It is not to be confused by two things. One is sound detection, which is covered by language number one, the system of vowel sounds. All animals including homo-sapiens, depend for their very survival on having this capability. What this has in common in all species is that it derives from the vocal chords. The second language is unique to modern human for it is merely 20-30,000 years old and it is what we call consonants. The first language is probably as old as animal history itself in that only species with this capability survived the process Darwin called "survival of the fittest". What is truly brilliant is how the two languages are put together by humans to form a coded message of immense capability, the ability to describe not only present day happenings, but past happenings and even speculation of future happenings.. All this has little to do with frequencies as such. In simpler terms it is analogous but infinitely more complex to the Morse Code, the 'dt-dah-dt' system. Where in the Morse Code it is necessary to hear both the "dt" as well as the "dah" to comprehend this system, in the speech system it is equally necessary to hear the consonant as well as the vowel. The typical hard of hearing person cannot hear the consonants for a very simple reason, it does not come via the vocal chords (technically labelled 'vibrating membranes') but is instead created mainly by the manipulation of the mouth and tongue. There is nothing that resonates in the consonant language, thus little to no amplification of the consonants. Again, there is no frequency involved, no high frequency versus low frequeny, just the correspondence of the 'dt-dah-dt' of the Morse Code to the vowel-cononant-vowel system which humans label as speech.

I have to disagree here. Chankley was right; The consonant sounds (fricatives and taps) ARE significantly higher frequencies than vowel sounds. In fact the difference may be several octaves, easily placing the consonant sounds in a range inaudible to a person who can still hear the vowels perfectly well. A correctly designed and adjusted digital (or analog even) hearing aid should be able to amplify different portions of the audio spectrum by different amounts, depending on the specific losses of the user.

I need to check into this further; I too am experiencing the 'hear but don't understand' problem.

Regarding the paragraph problem, do you actually look at the Preview page before clicking Submit? The Preview should show the post just as it will appear to others.

I found this article which describes three of the actual designs of presently available hearing aids. None of them simply amplifies the consonant band (around 3000 hz to 8000 hz).

There is some convoluted processing for the first type described, such as taking the energy of eg. the "s" band (highest freq consonant) and shifting that down into a lower band, where hearing is presumed to be better. This doesn't work for all hearers, according to the article, and that's easy to understand! The distortion effect of shifting down to another band is pretty severe, so I can't imagine the aid will restore any semblance of 'normal' hearing - although it could contribute to understanding if there is training to recognize the new version of consonants produced by the device.

It seems likely that this approach has been taken in attempt to serve a client with complete hearing loss in those consonant frequencies - amplifying wouldn't then help because there is no ability to hear it whatsoever.

Whereas Al Mond may be correct that for those of us with partial hearing loss, an ordinary amplifier of that frequency band might do the trick.

Dear artsmith. Appreciate your thoughtfulness in reply to my article. The title to my article "Do we really need hearing aids?" was intended to be gently provocative and in that respect it accomplished what was intended. However the main idea somehow gets lost because present-day hearing technology does not succeed in understanding the basic root problem and pushes the technology in a direction that will likely never succeed in creating understanding. Most of the non- understanding pertains not to any frequency considerations. How to most clearly state the hearing problem of the vast majority of HOH folks. The most critical element to drop is the concept of high versus low frequency. It is true that many if not most of the typical hearing loss involves or is first detected as a loss in the high frequencies. But the problem of loss of understanding is caused by a different route. Homo-sapien understood this 20-30,000 years ago, since they created it, using language number one, then through some utter genius adding noises to integrate into the every day language. Thus the birth of modern language. This modificaton of the language represents a two tiered coding system, consonant-vowel-consonant, as for example in the word K aaaa T, as we pronounce cat.. The problem with hearing both sides of the speech is that consonants are extremly quiet compared to vowels, as much as thousands of times quieter. So that is where the typical HOH er starts experiencing the hearing problem. Until this principle is understood, the world of the HOH will remain suffering.

This may be oversimplistic, but what about an amplifier design that boosts everything, and then clips off the high-volume parts, which would be the vowels?

Whether Al's basic idea works out in the long run, it seems to make a lot of sense, and to suggest some good experimental directions. (I'm not familiar with audiology, so by "sense" I mean common sense.)

Tonado: You are definitely on the right track. Build it and turn yourself into a billionaire. My personal choice is to knock out entirely all the vowels and then crank up the volume of the remaining consonants, however loud necessary to match the ambient vowels from outside your device. That way you don't have to worry about feedback squeal if you leave the vowels in. Hope you are in this field so you can experiment. Good luck.

Not correct, sorry. This idea of frequency content of the consonants is the major fallacy which is preventing needed progress to occur in trying to solve the understandability problem. The frequency is not involved in the understandability. The coding of speech like the consonant-vowel-consonant combination, creates understandability. Because the consonants are thousand of times quieter than the vowels, we HOH people lose our ability to hear them and there goes out the window our ability to understand. Success will be obtained when the HOH no longer say "I hear you but I don't understand you".

Do you have any scientific proof of what you believe to be true, and what you believe to be a fallacy?

Unfortunately, I don't have time right now to take photos of speech as seen on an oscilloscope or computer screen, but for a given 'scope sensitivity, the slope of a curve is proportional to the frequency (steep slope indicates high frequency), and the amplitude is proportional to the sound energy and therefore loudness. These are not necessarily linear proportions. Loudness and quietness are highly subjective, and the ability of a normal (young) human ear to hear sounds does indeed cover a level of energies of several orders of magnitude.

The fricatives (hissing sounds) and the taps or stops all produce very steep slopes, which means high frequencies. The vowels are octaves lower in frequency.

Thank you for your quite thoughtful answer. These are the kind of considerations that I hoped for when I wrote my piece. There were many 'fluff' replies but also a few fine pieces like yours. What I am shooting for is not really a hearing aid device as much a method for correcting of the basic language construction. Speech audio is composed of two languages, one as old as the animal kingdom itself, maybe 2.5 million years old. All species of animal survived likely because they developed vocal chords, thus fulfilling Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' criteria. Sounds derived by air passing the vocal chords has an enormous range of loudness, from whisper level to jokingly 'glass shattering' level. A better example that we have undoubtedly all experienced is the volume level of a baby's cry. Just imagine, fresh from the womb and having that kind of vocal power! This language remains with all the animals, including homo-sapien to this very day. (We label it as vowels). But 20-30,000 years ago, recent in terms of historical measurement, some paleolithic person determined that by adding new sounds to the old language an explosion of ideas was possible in which to describe not only present events in detail, but events of the past and even events occurring in the future. Where was he/she to get these new sounds since his vocal chords were preoccupied with language number one, sound generated from the vocal chords. That paleolithic genius made it happen by picking up a new source for sound making, using mouth shaping, lip motion and tongue shaping to create this second language. This act permitted this apian-man to make his species sky rocket in predominance over all other competing life forms. That leap forward continues into modern day. That is the background of human speech. Un-luckily for the HOH folks among us, they can't hear consonants because consonants simply didn't develop in a manner which provided amplification, like the vowel system. With this shortcoming the words with different consonants but similar vowels like "pan,can, sand, man, etc". are indistinguishable one from another. Thus we lose the understandability because one of the two languages for the HOH is weak and therefore the code of speech, the consonant-vowel-consonant code is lost.

hello Bumble,

That is a useful paper but I think you have missed something - Al Mond is correct that consonants are lower amplitude than vowels, and this is documented in your link:

"Research on speech acoustics has shown that the intensity of most consonant sounds is substantially lower than that of vowels, with the weakest consonant being as much as 30 dB lower than the strongest vowels (Dunn and White, 1940)." bottom of page 3.

This author (Burkle) says "..consonant information has predominantly high frequency information above 2000 Hz, contrasting with vowels which contain predominantly mid to low frequencies below 2000 Hz". I've seen the figure of 3000 hz elsewhere; in any case, the consonant-to-vowel amplitude ratio can be increased simply by selectively amplifying the sound above 2000 or 3000 hz. Obviously you don't want to lose the vowels completely but we're assuming they are already loud enough.

Ordinary sound equipment with a simple filter can amplify a selected band - all the way up to 20,000 hz if you want. Although, afaik, there is often lots of interference in the upper hearing range that doesn't make it easier to distinguish the highest consonants (S, F, sh..cymbals! ) and there are inaudible frequencies (for most) ie above 12,000 hz where there may be strong signals in the environment that actually interfere with your hearing without being heard. (I have papers somewhere that document microwave interference with intelligibility as well). So I would not personally want to amplify above 9500 hz to maximize intelligibility of speech.

COULD YOU PLEASE SPEAK UP, I CAN"T HEAR YOU!!!!!!

You do hear me, but you don't understand me. In other words you can detect that I may be talking to you, but darned if you can understand me. My prognosis is, you can't hear language number two, the consonants.

Consonants are short duration sounds and thus have a higher frequency content. My suggestion is to move to Hawaii - they don't use those pesky consonants down there. And stay away from Eastern European countries where they don't use vowels.

Just because you brought it up, Is there any significant difference in the rate of HOH problems in Hawaii, or Eastern Europe?

I think you will have to talk louder, RIXTER apparently couldn't hear you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hearing_loss_(adult_onset)_world_map_-_DALY_-_WHO2002.svg

So much for the consonant theory.

What?

(thanks)

My tinnitus has been getting progressively worse. I've found that it helps when people exaggerate when they enunciate. I'm not sure whether it's a visual aid for lip reading or whether I can hear the increase in enunciation better. My youngest son seems to be the hardest to hear as he slurs and mumbles a lot (16 year olds are prone to that sort of stuff).

I haven't noticed any difference in consonants vs. vowels. I would imagine that harder consonants like "T" and "P" would be easier to hear yet harder to differentiate. Consonants where the percussion occurs in the mouth or throat like "D" or "G" are probably harder to hear.

I'll have to watch what people are saying.

To lo Volt - I have had boughts of tinitus in the past and since religously wearing ear muffs I have had minimal episodes.I saw a product that alledgeges it cures tinitus have you heard of it or given it a try a product called Quietus

Some HOH problems are more complicated: You can have loss of hearing a range of frequencies in the normal spectrum. Or Gaps in the spectrum of the normal range from 20Hz to 15 kHz... Different types of losses.

if you know which end of the spectrum is affected on the person you are speaking to, you might just change tone to lower or higher frquency (pitch) when saying the same words. A little effort to pronounce differently can make a big difference in such conversations. It is not allways the volume that is necessary to increase but the change of octaves .. (?)

Is there any way to cancel the 10kHz ringing in my ears?

eat more organic vegetables.. believe it or not. all these health issues connect to the digestive system. (vision, hearing, teeth, hair, nails, etc.)

Sing out loud. That should at least make it less of a distraction. At least to you.

I'm told it's closer to 4 KHz. It's also the resonant frequency of the cilia that sense the vibrations and convert to nerve impulses. When the cilia are damaged the nerve endings have no transducer to work with. The nerves pass on the "signal" that that says the resonant frequency has been canceled. In reality there's no signal at all.

To me it sounds like crickets out over the fields on a summer night. Not really bothersome, more soothing. Helps put me to sleep. Who needs white noise generators?

What bothers me is that low frequencies seem all the louder. I can hear the heavy bass amps that people put in cars for miles before other people can.

Perhaps for some its 4 kHz, but I'm more like lynlynch. Mine is at least 10 kHz. I've thought many times of setting up an audio oscillator and a tweeter to try to determine the actual frequency. One of these days I'll do that! My tinnitus reminds me of when I could hear the 15.75 kHz horizontal magnets on CRT TVs. When I first started teaching computers in the late'70s, all the computers used TVs as displays, and that constant sound gave me headaches. After only a couple of years, I could no longer hear it. I don't know if that was my body protecting me, or just the fact that I was passing 40. Ditto on using glasses...

Ah, yes. I tortured many a coworker with frequencies I can't hear. Especially the kids. Reminds me of those anti-teenager devices that put out a 16-20 KHz tone. Most adults can't hear them, but they drive teenagers away.

maybe that is why I've hated soap operas and talk radio, especially when I was a teenager!

sounds awesome!

and living in flatland probably doesn't hurt either,where your normal focal distance is 20km.

cheers,

Chris

I don't know if you are correct, but I suspect so, at least to some extent... I am a firm believer in 'Use it or loose it', whether it be muscles, eyes, brain, or whatever.

Unfortunately, I didn't use earmuffs 50 or so years ago, when I had jobs using dynamite and shooting shotguns (in Calif rice fields), so I lost some of my then excellent hearing, and it has not come back.

I think fortunately, nearly all the eyeglasses I've used for the last 30 or so years have been of the 'varilux' (no-line bifocals) variety, which forces, or allows, the eyes to adapt according to the position of the head. As a result, when I change to different glasses, my eyes and/or my brain adjust rather quickly. On the other hand, I'm more than a bit jealous of young people who can hold something 6" from their eyes to read the fine text...

If only it were that simple. I work with one of the best hearing aid specialists on the East Coast. I have development tools for one of the leading digital hearing aid chips on the market. This device does a 128 bin FFT and an IFT in real time so you can go in and push up or down whatever you want. It has 5 DSP processors cranking an equivalent of 40 million 32 bit MACs/S in your ear on a hearing aid battery. Nothing short of amazing. But correction is not an easy thing. One of the weakest links in the whole process is fitting the aid. If an aid is not properly selected and fitted according to patient need it can be anywhere from worthless to worse than worthless. The number of aids that are improperly fitted is frightening. We see these people every day of the week and fix most of them. Some have entirely the wrong aid and virtually all are not properly adjusted. In addition, compliance is an issue. It takes as long as a month for your brain to adjust to an aid and for your hearing to actually improve but most people are not properly counseled to be patient for this to occur. There are good aids and there are excellent aids but there just aren't enough people qualified to fit them.

Hello rcapper,

I found this discussion and your answer very interesting, I have always known sound was a complicated subject and as an engineer have got progressivley deafer as I have aged. I have been fortunate to have been fitted with two digital hearing aids (behind the ear type), each can have seven individual frequency adjustments. This enables me to carry on a normal life, albeit I am retired (68) without feeling excluded as I did when I could not take part in normal conversations.

It always surprises me that it is the simple things that let down the technology. i.e. the fitting process. I had not realised this was so critical. (The same applies to specticles).

Thank you for your contribution and to the questioner I have found the debate interesting and useful.

Oliver Dunthorne

PS Any further interesting reading I would be pleased to hear about.

$10.00.....THOUGHT IT WOULD NOT WORK.....IT DID WORK WELL!!!!-----Harbor Freight's $10.00 hearing unit. Equal to something out of 1975 era but what the heck, read the reviews at www.harborfreight.com. Works well enough for me to figure if I want to go further with the idea.

Dear Al,

don't give up!

Please excuse me if I propose an experiment seeming too rudimentary:

what happens when you listen to AM radio, slightly detuned? It has to be one of those old, simple sets, with no automatic tuning.

That harsh sound is due to a sort of consonant boosting. Does it help a little?

brgds

Snel

Snel: You are quite correct in what you call your experiment. That is how I often listen to radio. It proves in a small way what I am trying to get across, that understanding speech has little to do with high and low frequencies and more to do with understanding the 'Morse Code' of human speech, the consonant-vowel-consonant combinations making up human speech. Once the hearing aid world begins to understand this basic principle, there will be meaningful progress in hearing aids and even more importantly, how we transmit radio and TV audio signals. Your 'experiment' permits a HOH person to recognize the break, when going between the consonant and vowel, thus helping to understand.

To the many subscribers who have followed this thread, I invite them to try this easy experiment at home to demonstrate the comparative sound levels of consonants versus vowels. To those who know Morse Code, the so-called 'dit-dah' language invented by Mr. Morse, it will demonstrate clearly the relative volume levels of the two languages of speech, the consonants and the vowels. Have one individual move fairly distant and yet still able to hear and correctly interpret messages sent by vocal Morse Code using the two words, 'dit' and 'dah' to represent the short dash and the long dash. Having the two individual at that distance apart now change the wording from "dit-dah" to the following, change the 'dit' to eliminate the "i" in the 'dit' leaving the two words of Morse Code as "dt-dah", no vowel anymore in the 'dit' word. At the same distance where the "receiving" individual could formerly hear and interpret the code, this will likely no longer be true since the change of 'dit' to 'dt' displacing its vowel will now be almost unheard, and even if slightly heard will not be translated correctly. This is somewhat analogous to ordinary speech where we must hear those weak consonants otherwise "we hear but we don't understand".

Perhaps we are attacking the wrong problem.

Instead of focusing on getting people to hear consonant sounds as they age, why not evolve our language to use less consonants and more vowels. While it's not a very interesting technical challenge for engineers, it would give our linguistic colleagues something to do while engineers deal with other problems (i.e. future energy sources, improved transportation, etc.).

or conversely,

why not a device or cell phone app that converts speech to text.. if the application recognizes that your name has been called, it vibrates your device... and shows you the text when you hit a button. (rather like captioning on the tv shows, but talking directly to you)

that way one device allows great communication for all levels of disability.

you could also add a feature that converts text to speech.. (helpful for the deaf) but I'm sure this already kind of exists. If you are only partly deaf, you won't need this.. and can hold your own half of the conversation or phone call. but the caller or other conversant gets all their text converted to speech.. which adds to what you heard.

my own hearing.. I punctured my ear drums about 10 years ago.. and find it very difficult to carry on conversations where there is some noise or other discussion in the background (ie noisy restaurants, parties, etc.) It doesn't take much to make it difficult for me.. but the louder the background, the less I understand, and end up having to make direct facial alignment. (I don't lip read, but almost)

Chris

Chris

Chris,

Such devices (speech to text and text to speech) already exist although may be limited. They are advancing every year.

If you don't mind sharing, how did you puncture your ear drums? (I am assuming it was both as you used ear drums instead of ear drum).

I find I have a difficult time focusing on someone talking to me when I am in a mall or busy restaurant. As far as I know my hearing is fine. I refer to it as sensory overload (too much information for me to process).

Its all rather embarrassing.

short answer... Q-Tips, hair gel, sweater with baggy sleeves, and a girlfriend that had "accidentally" spent the night with another guy. a recipe for disaster.

girlfriend is long gone... q-tips still in use.

chris

Wow....sorry to hear about that. Sounds like the making of a movie.

that which doesn't kill me...

It was rather ironic really... all about what you don't want to hear... and now don't hear any more...

the kind of lesson you only need once. what is on the inside is more important than the packaging. its just that the packaging is sometimes hard to resist...

chris

I know exactly what you mean.

thanks

Chris,

Do you remember the Graham Greene character, Edgar Montrose, on the Red Green show? Were you quoting him? The guy who solved all problems with dynamite? After one of his blasts went somewhat wrong (as usual), he said to Red: "What doesn't kill me.... ... makes me deaf." This was amusing because we all expected to hear the cliche which ends in "makes me stronger." That cliche only applies to emotional assaults and the antibody reaction to mild viral infections, not so much exposives and most physical injuries.

I am sorry to hear that you suffered this injury. When I was 14, I was less than a minute into a visit to a friend's house when there was an explosion. It put a few of us into the hospital. The damage to my eardrums seemed to heal fine. Maybe being young helped.

David

Wouldn't it be good if we could communicate with mp3 soundbites instead of typing. To be read or just listened to. Stop, go, copy, paste. The posts would possibly get longer and the smileys would not be needed but other traits, pronunciation, temper etc. could be detected and avoid misunderstandings.

Wouldn't it be great to have a go with Rohrschach, or on the other end of the scale friends from the sub continent.

Just curios, Ky.

One problem with text to speech- I have noticed with time, that many "text to speech" projects (Dragonspeak being the one I am most familiar with) are no longer able to properly interpret my speech- it's like, as I loose my hearing, I am also loosing my ability to enunciate properly. My wife, who is not suffering from hearing loss yet, has no problem with the same software. I did not have this problem a few years ago, but apparently my loss of hearing is also affecting the way I vocalize...

yes... so thats why I threw in the extra feature of being able to type your output. When a non-diff-abled person speaks, it would translate well... even on the phone.

I believe in what you are saying...

Chris

On Dragonspeak, when speaking into the microphone, going at a slightly slower than normal, with great emphasis on hitting the consonants hard, and at a lower voice volume level, the Dragon will start behaving and will make far fewer errors.

What you are suggesting is equivalent to saying that instead of using dits and dahs in the Morse code, lets use less of the dits and more of the dahs. It is the coding that makes speech what it is. The language of all animals,except modern man, uses only the vowels. Now you wouldn't want to go back to that, would you.

Now you wouldn't want to go back to that, would you.

Why not? Does a complicated language make us any better or worse? Does a simpler language make us any better or worse? I don't know the answer, but I don't dismiss the question or the idea (language with few consonants) just because animals don't use consonants.

I'm not even sure it's possible to have a vowel only language, but Japanese has far fewer sounds than English, as does Korean and they are able to communicate quite well.

From what I understand, the San of South Africa speak in a language that is almost completely consonants. There are, I believe, other animal species that rely primarily on consonant sounds as well. Perhaps this needs a bit more study?

thats like younger people's language these days... full of Dohs and Duhs..

So maybe it should be called the Homer Simpson language (Doh!!)

You have repeatedly ignored me, but PLEASE LISTEN (isn't that what the thread's about?).

"The language of all animals ..." NO!

Perhaps the language of all land-dwelling mammals, but "All Animals" is just plain wrong. Inaccurate. Inexact. Incorrect. _{(running out of adjectives, but you get the idea)}.