Hear The Music

I love seeing 15 year old kids for a musicians’ hearing assessment. These are generally extremely talented and hard working young people who are doing everything they can to assure themselves of a life long career in some aspect of music and the arts.  Even at age 14 they are aware that the road ahead will not be smooth, with

In part 1 of this two part blog series, the characteristics of temporary hearing loss, also known as Temporary Threshold Shift (or TTS) were discussed. Using pure tone stimuli, TTS typically resolved in 16-18 hours – it was thought to be nothing more than a benign characteristic of noise or music exposure, with no predictive power.  And while this was

In 1995 Erik Borg and his colleagues published a comprehensive review of a number of studies dealing with noise exposure and its effect on both temporary threshold shift (TTS) and permanent threshold shift (PTS). In short, Borg found no relation between TTS, that typically resolves in 16-18 hours, and PTS other than to conclude that one needs to have some

Recently I wrote a blog about why frequency transposition (compression or shifting) should never be used with music. Although the reasoning was quite technical, it was based on the fact that in the higher frequency region, speech mostly has a “continuous spectrum” such as a band of noise or friction, much like what one would see with the consonants [s]

This letter is based on my 35 years of working with hard of hearing musicians at the Musicians’ Clinics of Canada.  Over the past few years an assortment of new technologies for hearing aids have become available that will allow hard of hearing audiophiles and musicians to reprogram their hearing aids once they leave the audiologist’s office. While on the

The new big craze in kids’ books seems to be Captain Underpants.  Actually there is nothing new about Captain Underpants- the first book came out in 1997 and to date there are 20 books and several movie spin-offs.  The books, written by Dav Pilkey, are centered in Piqua, Ohio, a small town in western Ohio, not far from Dayton. The

I decided to go for a swim into the south pacific off the coast of Guam, and submerged to about 36,000 feet just to listen to how noisy the Mariana Trench is. The Mariana Trench is the deepest part of the ocean and runs roughly in a crest from a north to south direction.  The pressure at that depth is

Frequency compression can be useful for speech but never for music.  Simply stated, with music frequency compressed harmonics can be too close together and it will sound discordant, or at least fuzzy. Frequency compression of any form can be quite useful to avoid dead regions in the cochlea for speech but this does not follow for music.   The difference is that in damaged

In last week’s blog entry , the psycho-acoustics of hearing two tones as “beating”, tonal, or simply as a fuzzy mess, was discussed.  In short, if two tones are in excess of 30 Hz apart, then they will sound tonal; if two tones are between 20 and 30 Hz, they will sound fuzzy when played together; and if they are

Actually, Psycho-acoustics is one of the more fascinating area of audition, and I must admit that I use what I learned in those pre-dawn classes every day of my clinical life. The question arises; assuming that the two notes are in the same or complimentary keys, when do two simultaneous notes  sound good together? Or conversely, when do two notes make