Hear The Music

Since David Kemp’s seminal article in 1978 on “Kemp’s echo”, otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) have been shown to be very useful clinically, despite the difficulty I have in spelling it correctly.  Other than for infant hearing screenings OAEs appear to demonstrate hearing pathology long before an audiometric loss is found.  That is, it takes a significant amount of cochlear damage to

Other than the title being a great joke (at the expense of our brass colleagues), there is some semblance of truth to it. Musicians (i.e. everyone in the orchestra) sit downwind of the trumpets and frequently have to bear the brunt of loud blasts on a regular basis. Other than sticking a sock in the trumpet bell, what can be

Welcome to part 3 of the acoustics of musical instruments (or as musicians would say, part C#)… actually I am sure that they wouldn’t say that- just trying to be funny. In the first of this blog series on the acoustics of musical instruments we discussed quarter wavelength resonator instruments such as the clarinet, and the brass section.  Clarinets have

This is a continuation of last week’s blog on the acoustics of musical instruments.  Last week we talked about quarter wavelength resonators and these are typically the clarinet and the brass instruments.  This latest blog is about the exciting half wavelength resonators- vocalists, strings, sax, flute, oboe and the bassoon. Our vocal chords are tightly held at both ends of

This will be the first of a three part blog on the acoustical bases of musical instruments.  The other two parts will be called Part B flat, and Part C sharp… a bit of music humor there…  Understanding how some instruments work help us to understand some of the comments and complaints from our hard of hearing clients.  It also

I always am amazed by how much the study of music and musicians teaches me about basic audiology.  One of the first things we learn in our first course on noise and its control in school is that the audiogram for noise exposure should be symmetrical.  Asymmetries in the audiogram are most likely related to non-noise etiologies such as the

In the December 2006 issue of The Hearing Journal (go to www.audiologyonline.com, click on “archives” and select Dec 2006) I gave a quick and easy test to see whether your favorite hearing can handle the louder inputs of music.  We all have favorite hearing aids (or favourite for our Canadian and British readers) and typically for speech, it involves some

How often does this happen to you?  …. Your “favorite” musician walks into your office and makes an amorphous comment about their hearing aids not sounding right or that they sound downright distorted.  After spending several hundred hours with NOAH and an assortment of other tools, you both throw your hands up in the air and say “I give up!” 

Brian Fligor and his colleagues have come up with a good “first estimate” of what we can tell our clients (and the media) about MP3 use.  It turns out that the main element in an MP3 player (other than the volume setting) is which earphone is used.  For the same song, same MP3 player, and the same volume, outputs can

Music and speech have many similarities and many differences. The typical signal to noise ratio of speech can be quite poor- background noises in social situations can be louder than the speech. This makes for a difficult listening situation. In contrast, when listening to music which is more intense than speech, there is an excellent signal to noise ratio such