Hear The Music

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

“This is the best of blogs; this is the worst of blogs…”, and so goes the beginning of Charles Dickens’ 19th century masterpiece a Tale of Two Cities… well, I changed it a bit but I am sure that he won’t mind. But that is exactly the schizophrenic nature of music and hearing aids. A hearing aid can be great