Hear The Music

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

What a good question!  And also what a great Capstone project this would be for an Audiology student!  The short answer is that we don’t really know, but here is the slightly longer answer. Music, like speech, has lower frequency fundamental energy, and then a series of higher frequency harmonics whose frequencies depend intimately on the acoustic characteristics of the

When fitting any modern digital hearing aid we are able to specify differing gains (and outputs) for soft speech, medium speech, and loud speech.  These “level dependent” filters are a hallmark of modern hearing aid technology.  There is some clinical controversy here in that one manufacturer may consider loud speech to be 75- 80 dB SPL and another 85 dB

I just returned from Quebec City- one of the earliest settlements in Canada.  It’s where the Mayflower first landed, visited a couple of pubs,  and then upon discovering their error realizing that the local people spoke with a French Canadian accent, turned around and went back out to the Atlantic Ocean, took a right turn and sailed down to Plymouth

Last week, a C, an E-flat, and a G walked into a bar. The bartender said, “Get out of here; we don’t serve minors here.” If you got that joke and found it really funny, then you are a musician, or at least passed your grade 2 theory exams.  If you didn’t find it funny then you either have a

Music brings audiologists and engineers together… Actually, music brings all people together, but that’s another blog.  In my travels I attend many national and international audiology conferences and the topic of music and hearing aids is a great opening line. (That’s how I met my fiancée, but that’s another blog as well). The engineers that are associated with the hearing

When it comes to listening to music through hearing aids, it is not a “complex and amorphous” task.  There are well-defined requirements for a music program and there are well-defined hardware technologies that a hearing aid must have.  These have been reviewed in previous blogs and can be found throughout the literature. The frustrating thing is that Mead Killion had

There are many unresolved questions and issues when it comes to the subject area of hearing and music.  We actually know very little about how music is processed in the brain, and really are only scratching the surface of this area.  Nevertheless, not to be stymied by the lack of knowledge in our field, I will at least attempt to

So what do music and Felix Baumgartner have in common?  Both are concerned with the speed of sound. I just returned home from giving some talks in Zurich, Switzerland, and if you have never been to Zurich, I can tell you it is an amazingly beautiful place.  The old town is full of buildings from the 16th century, and as

This week’s blog is guest written by Rachel Arntson, who is a Speech-Language Pathologist.  I actually initially trained as a Speech-Language Pathologist, but I could never learn to say it properly, so I went into Audiology.  Also, I also could never remember whether “language” was spelled as language or langauge… As it turns out, Rachel will be giving a talk