Marshall Chasin

Marshall Chasin, AuD, is an audiologist and the Director of Auditory Research at the Musicians’ Clinics of Canada, Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto (in Linguistics), Associate Professor in the School of Communication Disorders and Sciences at the Western University. He is the author of over 200 articles and 7 books including Musicians and the Prevention of Hearing Loss. Dr. Chasin has been the recipient of many awards over the years including the 2012 Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Award for service to Canada and the Canada 150 Medal in 2017. He has developed a new TTS app called Temporary Hearing Loss Test app.

Some acoustics of musical instruments: Part A

Marshall Chasin

This will be the first of a three part blog on the acoustical bases of musical instruments. The other two parts will be called Part B flat, and Part C sharp… a bit of music humor there… Understanding how some instruments work help us to understand some of the comments and complaints from our hard of hearing clients. It also

Music and audiometric asymmetries

Marshall Chasin

I always am amazed by how much the study of music and musicians teaches me about basic audiology. One of the first things we learn in our first course on noise and its control in school is that the audiogram for noise exposure should be symmetrical. Asymmetries in the audiogram are most likely related to non-noise etiologies such as the

A quick test to see if your favorite hearing aid can handle music

Marshall Chasin

In the December 2006 issue of The Hearing Journal (go to www.audiologyonline.com, click on “archives” and select Dec 2006) I gave a quick and easy test to see whether your favorite hearing can handle the louder inputs of music. We all have favorite hearing aids (or favourite for our Canadian and British readers) and typically for speech, it involves some

Scotch tape and Music

Marshall Chasin

How often does this happen to you? …. Your “favorite” musician walks into your office and makes an amorphous comment about their hearing aids not sounding right or that they sound downright distorted. After spending several hundred hours with NOAH and an assortment of other tools, you both throw your hands up in the air and say “I give up!”

The 80/90 rule

Marshall Chasin

Brian Fligor and his colleagues have come up with a good “first estimate” of what we can tell our clients (and the media) about MP3 use. It turns out that the main element in an MP3 player (other than the volume setting) is which earphone is used. For the same song, same MP3 player, and the same volume, outputs can

Music easy…Speech difficult/Music difficult…Speech is easy

Marshall Chasin

Music and speech have many similarities and many differences. The typical signal to noise ratio of speech can be quite poor- background noises in social situations can be louder than the speech. This makes for a difficult listening situation. In contrast, when listening to music which is more intense than speech, there is an excellent signal to noise ratio such

Music and hearing loss

Marshall Chasin

“This is the best of blogs; this is the worst of blogs…”, and so goes the beginning of Charles Dickens’ 19th century masterpiece a Tale of Two Cities… well, I changed it a bit but I am sure that he won’t mind. But that is exactly the schizophrenic nature of music and hearing aids. A hearing aid can be great