Hear The Music

Clearly the most important stimulus that a hearing aid design engineer needs to be concerned about is speech.  Understandably music is a secondary concern.  There are many similarities between music and speech, so designing something for speech will not actually be that different than a circuit or a software program for music. Both speech and music are wide band spectra

There are many myths about music and how hearing aids should be fit.  This is about three of those myths. As technology gets better so will music fidelity Wider is better More advanced features are better Every single hearing aid design engineer has to come to grips with the similarities and differences between speech and music. Although this has always

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

Several hearing aid manufacturers have a tab on their fitting software that allows the hearing health care professional to adjust the parameters of the “music program” for various music genres.  For example, one manufacturer specifies less gain for rock and roll and more gain for jazz and blues.  The rationale is that they want to obtain the same output regardless

In-ear monitors are personalized monitors that many musicians are now using.  They look like hearing aids, smell like hearing aids, and perhaps, even taste like hearing aids.  But they are not hearing aids- they have a pre-amp, some have an “in situ” microphone, most are built into custom shells, and they have a receiver…. well, maybe they are hearing aids

It was a dark and stormy Thursday when suddenly the telephone rang.  I heard a voice that I didn’t recognize but something about it was familiar.  He said that he had lost something that was very important to him and he had to see me right away.  I gave him an appointment for later that evening.  He said his name

From time to time, I am asked about the concept of auditory toughening and what would the implications for musicians be.  It is worthwhile to do a brief review.  Much of the data is 20 years old but all of these experiments were well done and highly controlled for confounding factors. When one thinks of auditory toughening, it conjures up

The short answer is of course not.  What a stupid question! There are very few short term benefits to smoking, and absolutely no benefits to long term smoking.  Don’t smoke!  So why am I writing a blog with such a silly topic?  The short answer is “don’t smoke,” but the long answer is, well, a bit longer. Many professional organizations

In the first course about noise exposure that any audiologist takes, they are confronted with a pile high list of articles and research papers about the many studies concerning hearing loss and noise. Animal studies are generally about creating a permanent hearing loss (or permanent threshold shift PTS) and human studies concentrate on creating temporary hearing losses (or temporary threshold

Well, maybe not completely wrong,  but maybe partly wrong.  In previous blogs I delineated the electro-acoustic properties that all hearing aids should have in order to be optimized for listening to, and playing music. As a review, an optimal hearing aid should have:  a sufficiently high peak input limiting level so as not to distort the more intense stimuli associated