Hear The Music

The Berlin Wall has fallen…. again…. Actually the wall between having hearing aids that can handle speech as well as the more intense components of music has been down for about a decade but for some reason the hearing aid manufacturers have not announced it. It is true that there are some differences between music and speech.  It is also

The big news item in the United States recently is that it was found that Beyonce didn’t really sing live during the presidential inauguration, but just mouthed the words.  This news only hit Canada and the rest of the world now since it’s so cold outside that news (and the speed of sound which is a function of temperature) is

Last week we talked about using a higher stimulus level to assess the benefit of a musicians’ earplug.  Actually it was for all hearing protectors, but since this is a blog about music, this applies equally to musicians’ earplugs.  In that blog we talked about using a real ear measurement system and using the normal stimulus that comes with such

This is a really neat topic, even if the title is really boring.  “Control methods….” of anything sounds dull.  This is actually a stolen title off an historically important article from the 1950s “Control Methods used in a study of vowels” by Gordon Peterson and Harold Barney (1952).{{1}}[[1]]Gordon E. Peterson and Harold L. Barney, “Control Methods Used in a Study

Several weeks ago a friend of mine came over.  He is about 15 years younger than I and is a drummer for a rather famous rock band.  My son had just come home, having recently graduated from the Berklee School of Music in Boston.  And for Christmas, I had just received an ironically low-tech acoustic amplifier for my iPad. Here

This guest blog is by Patricia Johnson… and it is about things that may go wrong in your hearing system that we don’t clinically have the ability to assess.  Dr. Johnson received her Master’s degree in Audiology from the University of Iowa and her AuD from Salus University.  Her professional experience spans pediatric and educational audiology, industrial hearing conservation, university

Just prior to the Christmas break I blogged about the lack of cost effectiveness in seeing musicians versus clients who may need hearing aids.  In that post I bemoaned the fact that we are now working in not only a market economy but also a market society, where policy and funding decisions are made based on the bottom line, rather

Our first knee jerk reaction is that the word “music” and the word “distortion” should not be uttered in the same sentence. Music is good (or at least should be of high fidelity) and distortion is, well,… distortion. But if it weren’t for distortion, music would be thin and boring, and speech would be completely unintelligible. Without distortion, music would

There was a recent presentation given at the National Hearing Conservation Association (NHCA) conference last month questioning the integrity of the ER-15 uniform attenuator for musicians. The ER-15 custom made earplug has been available since 1988 and provides a much more uniform attenuation (lessening of sound energy) across the frequency region than other types of hearing protectors that have been

This is a comment I hear frequently from my colleagues and is used as an excuse not to work with musicians.  It’s actually the same comment that I hear for those who don’t want to offer aural rehabilitation classes, or sell inexpensive assistive listening devices.  Alas, the comment is both true and unfortunate. It really is simple arithmetic.  If an