Hear The Music

The musician is an acoustic athlete.  The only nonathletic  thing about musicians is that they are not represented at the Olympics.  Musicians suffer pulled muscles, strained backs, fatigue, depression, repetitive strain injuries, and in short, every type of injury athletes can suffer from. And on top of all that, musicians suffer from hearing loss, tinnitus, and hyperacusis, as well. A

One of the biggest lessons I had to learn when working with musicians is that it really is all about the musician- the audiologist is just along for the ride. This may seem obvious, but it’s not. I have been working with people in the performing arts since about the mid-1980s, and while you can get a feeling of being

For the vast majority of musicians a hearing protector that provides a flat or uniform attenuation is the way to go.  A hearing protector with a flat attenuation means that the lower frequency fundamental and higher frequency harmonics are all treated the same- everything is attenuated by the same amount that ostensibly reduces the sound level of the music from

When fitting musician earplugs, the clinical rule of thumb is the longer the better.  This has to do with the issue of stability as well as minimizing the occlusion effect. Simply stated, the occlusion effect is caused by the wearer’s own voice (or vibration energy from their instrument that is transduced through the mandible and condyle to the boney portion

Musician earplugs use some very creative methods to ensure that the attenuation that a musician receives is as flat as possible.  The lower frequency fundamental notes and the higher frequency harmonics are all treated identically- the spectrum of the music remains the same, albeit at a slightly lower level.   Technologies to accomplish this typically involve passive acoustic networks that utilize

As readers of this blog are already aware, most modern hearing aids do a poorer job of reproducing music than many of the hearing aids in the late 1980s.  The limitation with all digital hearing aids is the analog-to-digital (A/D) converter that converts analog sound and music from the microphone into a series of numbers for the digital hearing aid

This is the fifth in a series of blogs outlining some of what we know about optimal music recording.  When reading through these blogs one should be struck that we really know everything we need to know already when it comes to recording.  In some cases, what was learned in our first year audiology class provided  “obvious” recording cues (such

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts outlining some of what we know about optimal music recording.  When reading through these posts one should be struck that we really know everything we need to know already when it comes to recording.  In some cases, what was learned in our first year audiology class provided  “obvious” recording cues

This is the third in a series of blogs outlining some of what we know about optimal music recording.  When reading through these blogs one should be struck that we really know everything we need to know already when it comes to recording.  In some cases, what was learned in our first year audiology class provided “obvious” recording cues (such

This is the second in a series of blogs outlining some of what we know about optimal music recording.  When reading through these blogs one should be struck that we really know everything we need to know already when it comes to recording.  In some cases, what was learned in our first year audiology class provided  “obvious” recording cues (such