Hear The Music

Rick Ledbetter is a long time professional bass player and composer with a profound, late onset hearing loss. He has been programming his own aids through several sets, to meet his needs for live performance.  Rick is quite thoughtful about this area.  In April 2016 I had an open letter to hard of hearing musicians, which was repeated last week

  This was the most well-read blog in Hear the Music in 2016.  Not everyone agreed with everything that I had to say, but I guess that is what makes for a great blog!  Read the excerpt and please click the link to above to read it in full while I take some time over the holiday season to spend

Reverberation is the great equalizer. It can make great music sound the same as less-stellar counterparts. It can make a great speech in a large hall sound the same as one that is devoid of content, and it can distract anyone from the task at hand. And of course reverberation is like good wine – too much is as bad as too

An article in today’s Globe and Mail – one of Canada’s long-standing national newspapers – is about about Lars Ulrich, the drummer with Metallica and includes the quote: “I would get up from my bed in a hotel room to go turn the television off.  But the television wasn’t on. The sound was in my head.” For those readers who have been living

Brian C Moore, PhD from Cambridge in the UK recently had a paper published in the International Journal of Audiology (IJA) with the title “A review of the perceptual effects of hearing loss for frequencies above 3kHz”. The IJA is the official journal of the International Society of Audiology and the Society holds biennial international conventions. The most recent one was

I just returned from the Association of Independent Hearing Healthcare Professionals (AIHHP) conference in Nottingham, England, but I didn’t see Robin Hood, or had any time to go to Sherwood Forest.  I did however give several talks about musicians, and so did our HearingHealthMatters.org editor Brian Taylor; he spoke first and by the time I arrived in Nottingham, Brian was

The Hearing Aids for Music Project is a new project from Leeds University in England. Traditionally, the two phrases “hearing aids” and “great sounding music” do not belong in the same sentence.  There are a number of reasons for this and include issues relating to frequency bandwidth, compression, front end analog to digital features, and how “advanced features” interact with music.

For all of the criticisms of ANSI S3.22, this is a great standard… how’s that for an opening statement? ANSI S3.22 is how hearing aids are assessed in the clinic as well as at the manufacturer’s facility.  It is a quality control measure and known as a “reporting standard”.  That is ANSI S3.22 tells us precisely how to measure a

From time to time I fit electronic hearing protection for musicians or hunters. The idea is that electronic hearing protection would provide slight amplification for soft level sounds but hearing protection (sound attenuation) for overly loud sounds. These devices are really just hearing aids in disguise  – they are typically, but not always, digital, have a microphone(s), an amplifier, and a

I only recently switched from my old Blackberry which I have been using since the 1970s.  It is true that the Blackberry was slow, was almost impossible to use apps, but had some neat elevated buttons. My new phone (for about a year now) is the iPhone 6.  It has great apps and its usability is infinitely better than my