This tracks with what is known about sudden neurologically-involved hearing loss. I have a condition where the inner ear is misformed and the cochlea is, in crude terms, prone to bruising. I've hit my head and gone completely deaf on one side before, and some of my hearing came back but not all of it.
This sort of injury, with the missing sensory input, triggers brain plasticity. A lot of relearning goes on very quickly. It took only a few days until voices stopped sounding like chipmunks because I could not hear the low frequencies. I still couldn't hear them but I was starting to associate the new inputs with my memories of how I remember speech sounding. If I knew the person the voice was strongly gendered as male or female - with new speakers I had trouble guessing their sex. I still do.
From what little is known about this, exposure to sound is crucial during this phase. And a lot of people find it highly distressing. I was gripping my hands like in a panic/stress reaction when out in public in noisy environments. It is, paradoxically considering the quasi-deafness, a kind of sensory overload. Sounds I couldn't identify, coming from the wrong direction, with human voices sounding like garbled squeaks. A common reaction is to withdraw. But this almost certainly prevents relearning during the crucial phase of plasticity. I wish I had forced myself to go to more restaurants etc. immediately after, in hindsight. I suspect it may have resulted in less tinnitus long-term if I had done so.
This is so little studied it surprised me how little is out there when I went researching on what the best conditions to expose myself to after. I kind of had to make up a protocol myself.
I have another, much simpler guess - these headphones are dirty, and people are constantly wearing them, and cleaning them is pretty hard without damaging something - so most people just don't.
This leads them to be an ideal breeding ground of bacteria, and a constant source of ear infections. I'd say that's something that can pretty directly lead to hearing loss.
What resonated with me is if it can be sensitized one say, neuroplasticity can desensitize you the other way just as slowly.
Maybe buy headphones that let you adjust the level of noise cancelling gradually.
At the same time, noise pollution is a real issue and more of a drag on people's energy than realized. Using excellent ear plugs for short burts at a time is also useful for that reason.
Maybe it's a good thing noise cancelling ear buds could only have 5 hours or so of battery life at a time for both ears.
I have the opposite problem: any words I hear spoken in the vicinity directly interrupt my brain's language processor (which is single-threaded) and breaks any chain of thought or writing attempt.
I really love living in a country which languages I don't understand. I feel my brain is cosily protected when everyone around sounds like they are speaking in simlish.
I've lived in places like that and had similar thoughts. I remember riding a subway and hearing conversations and squabbles all around me and understanding none of it. I know if I could understand the language, my brain would have been busy trying to make sense of it all and keep up, but instead, it just wasn't, and I knew in the moment that I was getting a break.
I can watch youtube cookery or world food with no issue, but as soon as someone "real" talks I have a buffer of about 10s before my thoughts come crashing down around me - I think it's the expectation of response, and I can only talk or listen, my verbal output is single threaded and probably running on some old crappy processor with fdiv errors.
Same... can't read anything if I can hear someone talking, even if I don't want to listen to them. Music and noise-cancelling headphones make it all better. I can't understand anything if more than one person is talking at the same volume. Maybe that's just normal and I'm bad at lip reading, though.
As far as anecdata, I've worn noise-cancelling headphones at least 40 hours a week for the past 18 years. Granted, my formative years pre-date noise cancellation, but I haven't noticed any impact to my hearing or audio processing. Pretty sure I'd be listening to music much louder without noise cancellation.
Aligning visual content with the words being spoken can be helpful in cases like this.
I agree that I have taken care of my hearing despite doing what I want for the most part.
Now with small aliens roaming the homestead, being able to tune it out to access the well developed trained focus mode is useful.
At the same time, I'm not sure if anyone's using apps like Brain.fm or Endel to help keep some noise going to the brain, just not silence.
I have used brain.fm for a lot of years when I'd remember to (meaning I needed it), and recently started experimenting with Endel, which has been more useful than I anticipated.
> I can't understand anything if more than one person is talking at the same volume. Maybe that's just normal and I'm bad at lip reading, though.
I want to say it's normal, but it's also known as sensory or auditory processing disorder and it's not uncommon in neurodiverse people. Learning some lip reading or just observing someone's mouth movements helps me in those situations, but it's far from ideal.
Also the same here. And there’s nothing I can do. I can almost sweat with the effort of not heeding a background voice but I still will. Then my attention bounces back and forth.
> I have the opposite problem: any words I hear spoken in the vicinity directly interrupt my brain's language processor (which is single-threaded) and breaks any chain of thought or writing attempt.
And heaven forbid I try to speak a word or two while typing. Very often I type what I meant to say, and vice versa.
When I used to play the piano, making music would occupy the language processor. If you asked me a question while I was playing, I would have to stop in order to reply; I couldn't form any words otherwise.
This would be my guess as it sounds similar to what I experience and have been experiencing for decades long before any king of noise cancelling headphones. I find it very difficult to process noises when there are too many occurring at once and adding voices into the mix will make it look like I am lagging trying to respond. I have no idea what the underlying condition is, but I consider this problem to be called "misophonia". I think it is about not being able to filter sounds well.
Thankfully I'm not regularly in an environment that force me to wear noise cancelling headphones.
Sometimes I believe this was caused by my childhood bedroom being soundproofed, but I still went to noisy public school so who knows.
could be.... did a course for sound engineer, but didnt like the music biz, but still love sound...
human hearing is a very funny thing, part mechanical, part electrical impulse, with some rather sophisticted processing going on
in.that if you listen to a concert piano bieng played back on an ancient taped deck.with a 1 7/8”
speaker, that speaker is incapable of reproducing the low c, but you will hear it, because you can hear the harmonics of that low c, and your brain
fills in the "obvious" fundamental tone.
which means that we are always "hearing things":)
other wierd stuff, like going into an anekoic chamber, and sitting quietly, of which I have not done, but is apparently rather odd.
so it is possible that "noise cancelling" which is just enough processing to create a sound wave 180°out of phase to the "noise", could be messing with peoples brains, as it trys to out process the very unnatural digital processing.
As a hyperacusis sufferer that has never used noise-cancelling headphones, I'd have to say 'unlikely', my hyperacusis came with my anxiety - something many of the people in the article have too - and largely seems to be triggered by modern car-focused town design, and constantly being battered by loud engine sounds, revving engines and other annoyances.
It seems like you would have to wear them a lot to lose the ability to filter out noise naturally. Five hours seems insufficient, even for a teen. Maybe if you wore it all day? I want noise-canceling headphones that filter out all non-natural sounds. I want to hear the birds but not people talking or leaf blowers or trucks going beep beep beep. Maybe smarter headphones are the answer (besides, of course, making the world not so damn obnoxious).
What if you don't wear it that many hours but it's all the hours you're in noisy environments? You'd lose the ability to naturally filter the noisy environments because you never experience them.
I have this to far less extremes: I've always sought quiet. There nothing wrong with my hearing as tested. I can't hear people talk very well in any kind of busy situation, and it at least seems to me that other people there aren't struggling. Of course they could be and they just don't say anything about it.
I have the same issue and had it all my life but got a bit worse as I got older. I used to feel ashamed of this but no longer do as I excuse myself from environments that distress me. I’ve been thinking about hearing aids but just like you my hearing is good, it’s a processing issue and am not sure hearing aids could help. Still willing to give them a try, I heard the apple earpods pro are good at filtering out voices from a noise environment.
I suffer from Misophonia and I wear my Bose QC45 10 hours+ a day - each day. Without them I could not function and they made life with Misophonia somewhat tolerable.
Personal anecdote: I have tinnitus and noise-cancelling headphones sets it off worse than regular headphones. As in, I always have a constant low-level ringing, but certain triggers can 10X or 100X the intensity. As a developer, I was a heavy user of noise canceling headphones before this.
> It affected her social life too and Sophie would leave bars and restaurants early because of the "overwhelming noise".
This can also be attributed to enshittification. Restauranteurs and bar owners found that noisier places increase turnover and cause people to drink more.
Totally this. Acoustics in bars and restaurants has gone completely to shit. Even if they don't turn the music up too loud, it can be extremely hard to have a conversation without shouting, even if the place isn't crowded. I understand the need to not have people linger at a popular spot, but there has to be a better way then to make the place actively unpleasant to be in.
It's also a kind of prisoner's dilemma or positive feedback loop, even without music: people in crowded bars talk loudly (especially with alcohol) which requires people nearby to talk louder to be heard, then it gets even louder and so on.
While we're on noise-cancelling headphones, this reminds me of a recent experience on a train (in the quiet carriage, of course) wearing my noise-cancelling headphones. There was a toddler crying and screaming loudly and the sound seemed to cut right through the headphones. I wonder if they're somehow tuned to not block certain sounds (Sony WH-1000XM4).
I think it's more that noise cancellation is more difficult at higher frequencies. You have to match the waveforms much more precisely to get effective cancellation at high frequencies, so active cancellation is mostly going to work in the low range. Works great for a lot of steady machinery sounds like the rumble of a train or airplane, but does little for high-pitched voices.
When I wear Bose noise-cancelling headphones on airplanes I can hear the female flight attendants much better than when I'm not wearing headphones. The noise-cancelling filters out lower frequencies and constant hum (wind, engines), but not the higher-pitched frequencies (which is why the female voices are easier to hear, and, as you mentioned, crying toddlers).
So, when the announcement asks people to remove headphones while they explain the security setup it actually has the opposite effect for me - it makes it more difficult to hear what they're saying if I remove my headphones.
Note that there are different kinds of noise-cancelling headphones. The ones pilots wear are different, and then you have those made for hunters - they are focused at reacting very fast to sounds from shooting.
My Sony ones have an actual setting for this, the ambient sound mode has a "focus on voices" option and yes, it does help me pick up voices more clearly than usual if there's background noise.
They're not, it's just the physics of sound cancelation. Some frequencies, especially higher, irregular ones are harder to block, just because the microprocessor doesn't have enough time to react
noise cancelling works best for constant sounds (like the thrum of an engine or a murmur of the crowd) so the anc processor can "compensate" for that sound. If a toddler was crying irregularly, with "wahs" at longer bursts, it's possible that the ANC didn't have time for it's time window to compensate for the sound. Aka the sound started and stopped before a particular time window.
not sure if it is by design, but a larger window would potentially decrease computational load since it doesn't need to recalibrate and reprocess at a higher rate.
Probably white noise would cover those but some people can’t take white noise. I actually love white noise, it calms me and helps me stay focused on the task at hand
I disabled noise-cancelling on my headphones because I actually found it make the sound of my kid crying very uncomfortable.
I honestly think that noise-cancelling is a great idea for a technology, and is basically required from a marketing perspective, but not all that helpful in practice. Sound isolation isn't is sexy, but it works much better.
I would think there'd be a lot of utility in not blocking smoke alarm sounds, for example. The screeching from distressed infants can similarly be both very loud and very high pitched.
I have bouts of BPPV like this, an extremely common condition which is vertigo and/or tinnitus due to calcium crystals in the ear interacting with either hearing and/or balance.
I get bouts of this from wearing sealed headphones for too long (not specifically noise cancelling headphones but pretty relevant since noise cancelling headphones almost always form an airtight seal with the ear to work so they too fall into this category).
I think for myself there's certain atmospheric conditions that lead to the otoconia (the crystals that cause it) irritating my hearing and sealed over the ear headphones are a huge cause for me.
Might be worth looking into. The treatment for BPPV is to move your head in specific ways to shake the crystals out which is damn simple to do too so if it is the cause it's actually quite treatable.
No, the opposite. If I take a long-haul flight (intercontinental) without using noise-cancelling headphones I'll have increased tinnitus for the next month. That problem is greatly reduced if I use the headphones.
When that's said, the newer planes like e.g. the Airbus A350, if your're sitting in a reasonably good spot, has vastly less noise than the ones I used to fly in the past (747, for example).
I get that feeling too. I have the Samsung Galaxy buds3 pro. They seem to be worse than my Bose 700. After wearing them for a while with NC, I feel like I have to take them off or turn the sound louder. I defaulted to using them with NC off unless I'm in a very loud environment.
Yes! I love my Airpods Max more than any other headphone ever but I wear them all the time and mt tinnitus is crazy. Should stop wearing them, at least reduce.
How high do you have volume when you have the noise cancellation on?
I have pretty bad tinnitus and most of my waking hours I have my AirPod Pros in but haven't noticed any increase in my tinnitus.
Yep, even when they have sound going through them 100% of the time as to not hear my tinnitus. I would expect sudden quiet making me pay attention to it again causing it to be worse but nope, doesn't matter.
I think many people aren't super interested in hearing. Many times I find repeating things to my younger team members and gradually it started being something.
Not about hearing, I think it's a way of being and trust me I'm not the only one noticing this.
We've even had talks with HR to see how we could adapt as honestly I thought at some point I was the one with challenges transmitting things.
Listening to everyone and everything in many instances is critical to problem solving...
The rise of video tutorials over written text kinda lets me think that's not a general problem but I've also always preferred written information over audio (in school, in uni, sometimes for talks - not so much for conversations, but even then I have trouble remembering details, compared to reading).
Interesting thinking about this being connected with young people using subtitles all the time. I've been using noise isolating and active noise cancelling earbuds and headphones for a good 20 years while working in noisy cubicle farms, open office plans, and working at home with kids around, and I don't think I have the problems cited here. Is it an age related thing? I didn't start with the headphones until I was in my mid 20's
> Interesting thinking about this being connected with young people using subtitles all the time.
For what it's worth, I've used subtitles whenever possible ever since that became a thing, more or less with the advent of DVDs, which was in my teens to twenties. But I do also have childhood hearing damage in one ear.
> [..] suggests that by blocking everyday sounds such as cars beeping, there is a possibility the brain can "forget" to filter out the noise.
> "You have almost created this false environment by wearing those headphones of only listening to what you want to listen to. You are not having to work at it," she said.
Ah yes, the natural peaceful environment of car horns blowing at >100 decibels.
Look, any research in any medical condition is always useful. But the entire article doesn't mention a word on the real problem: the world has just gotten too damn loud. Car horns are loud enough to cause hearing damage even at short exposure, as is extended exposure to traffic. So yeah, maybe we should primarily be looking at the modern hellscape that we've created instead of looking at the ways people use to manage this.
It wouldn’t surprise me. I can definitely feel a ‘pressurization’ when wearing headphones or earbuds with noise cancellation. That isn’t the “natural” way our ears operate so there must be some side effects. But I wonder if the same would be true for wearing ear plugs or earbuds that don’t have active noise cancellation but sit tightly in your canal.
I feel that 'pressurisation' too with my AirPods Pro (in-ear speakers) - it becomes increasingly uncomfortable, so that after about 20 minutes I have to turn it off. With the same pair of earbuds with noise cancellation off, I don't have the problem.
I personally dislike having Bluetooth receivers pressed against my skull or even placing it inside my cavities therefore trying to use it as little as possible.
Overtime I got more electro sensitive and when there are to many wireless devices around me I get a type of temporary tinnitus which persist for a while. Grounding myself helps to relieve it.
I mean think about it couple of decades ago there wasn’t even one wireless device around now I receive alone 40 router signals in my apartment building. When everybody is at home in the evening I feel the electro smog tinnitus the strongest.
This tracks with what is known about sudden neurologically-involved hearing loss. I have a condition where the inner ear is misformed and the cochlea is, in crude terms, prone to bruising. I've hit my head and gone completely deaf on one side before, and some of my hearing came back but not all of it.
This sort of injury, with the missing sensory input, triggers brain plasticity. A lot of relearning goes on very quickly. It took only a few days until voices stopped sounding like chipmunks because I could not hear the low frequencies. I still couldn't hear them but I was starting to associate the new inputs with my memories of how I remember speech sounding. If I knew the person the voice was strongly gendered as male or female - with new speakers I had trouble guessing their sex. I still do.
From what little is known about this, exposure to sound is crucial during this phase. And a lot of people find it highly distressing. I was gripping my hands like in a panic/stress reaction when out in public in noisy environments. It is, paradoxically considering the quasi-deafness, a kind of sensory overload. Sounds I couldn't identify, coming from the wrong direction, with human voices sounding like garbled squeaks. A common reaction is to withdraw. But this almost certainly prevents relearning during the crucial phase of plasticity. I wish I had forced myself to go to more restaurants etc. immediately after, in hindsight. I suspect it may have resulted in less tinnitus long-term if I had done so.
This is so little studied it surprised me how little is out there when I went researching on what the best conditions to expose myself to after. I kind of had to make up a protocol myself.
I have another, much simpler guess - these headphones are dirty, and people are constantly wearing them, and cleaning them is pretty hard without damaging something - so most people just don't.
This leads them to be an ideal breeding ground of bacteria, and a constant source of ear infections. I'd say that's something that can pretty directly lead to hearing loss.
Interesting synopsis.
What resonated with me is if it can be sensitized one say, neuroplasticity can desensitize you the other way just as slowly.
Maybe buy headphones that let you adjust the level of noise cancelling gradually.
At the same time, noise pollution is a real issue and more of a drag on people's energy than realized. Using excellent ear plugs for short burts at a time is also useful for that reason.
Maybe it's a good thing noise cancelling ear buds could only have 5 hours or so of battery life at a time for both ears.
Your experience is chillingly close to mine. Been using noice cancellers for 4-5 years now and if I hear loud noises in public, I get very distressed.
> This sort of injury, with the missing sensory input, triggers brain plasticity
Huh. Charles Bonnet syndrome?
I have the opposite problem: any words I hear spoken in the vicinity directly interrupt my brain's language processor (which is single-threaded) and breaks any chain of thought or writing attempt.
I really love living in a country which languages I don't understand. I feel my brain is cosily protected when everyone around sounds like they are speaking in simlish.
I've lived in places like that and had similar thoughts. I remember riding a subway and hearing conversations and squabbles all around me and understanding none of it. I know if I could understand the language, my brain would have been busy trying to make sense of it all and keep up, but instead, it just wasn't, and I knew in the moment that I was getting a break.
I can watch youtube cookery or world food with no issue, but as soon as someone "real" talks I have a buffer of about 10s before my thoughts come crashing down around me - I think it's the expectation of response, and I can only talk or listen, my verbal output is single threaded and probably running on some old crappy processor with fdiv errors.
Same... can't read anything if I can hear someone talking, even if I don't want to listen to them. Music and noise-cancelling headphones make it all better. I can't understand anything if more than one person is talking at the same volume. Maybe that's just normal and I'm bad at lip reading, though.
As far as anecdata, I've worn noise-cancelling headphones at least 40 hours a week for the past 18 years. Granted, my formative years pre-date noise cancellation, but I haven't noticed any impact to my hearing or audio processing. Pretty sure I'd be listening to music much louder without noise cancellation.
Aligning visual content with the words being spoken can be helpful in cases like this.
I agree that I have taken care of my hearing despite doing what I want for the most part.
Now with small aliens roaming the homestead, being able to tune it out to access the well developed trained focus mode is useful.
At the same time, I'm not sure if anyone's using apps like Brain.fm or Endel to help keep some noise going to the brain, just not silence.
I have used brain.fm for a lot of years when I'd remember to (meaning I needed it), and recently started experimenting with Endel, which has been more useful than I anticipated.
> I can't understand anything if more than one person is talking at the same volume. Maybe that's just normal and I'm bad at lip reading, though.
I want to say it's normal, but it's also known as sensory or auditory processing disorder and it's not uncommon in neurodiverse people. Learning some lip reading or just observing someone's mouth movements helps me in those situations, but it's far from ideal.
I have this problem! Not 100% of the time though. Some thinking tasks are non auditory, and don't get interrupted. But yeah, is there a term for this?
I read books on auditory processing disorder about 8 to 10 years before I was diagnosed autistic.
Also the same here. And there’s nothing I can do. I can almost sweat with the effort of not heeding a background voice but I still will. Then my attention bounces back and forth.
> I have the opposite problem: any words I hear spoken in the vicinity directly interrupt my brain's language processor (which is single-threaded) and breaks any chain of thought or writing attempt.
And heaven forbid I try to speak a word or two while typing. Very often I type what I meant to say, and vice versa.
When I used to play the piano, making music would occupy the language processor. If you asked me a question while I was playing, I would have to stop in order to reply; I couldn't form any words otherwise.
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knock knock... interrupting cow...
Maybe shes wearing those noise canceling headphones because of her auditory processing condition and not the other way around??
This seems like basic speculative attribution error- no research here.
This would be my guess as it sounds similar to what I experience and have been experiencing for decades long before any king of noise cancelling headphones. I find it very difficult to process noises when there are too many occurring at once and adding voices into the mix will make it look like I am lagging trying to respond. I have no idea what the underlying condition is, but I consider this problem to be called "misophonia". I think it is about not being able to filter sounds well.
Thankfully I'm not regularly in an environment that force me to wear noise cancelling headphones.
Sometimes I believe this was caused by my childhood bedroom being soundproofed, but I still went to noisy public school so who knows.
could be.... did a course for sound engineer, but didnt like the music biz, but still love sound... human hearing is a very funny thing, part mechanical, part electrical impulse, with some rather sophisticted processing going on in.that if you listen to a concert piano bieng played back on an ancient taped deck.with a 1 7/8” speaker, that speaker is incapable of reproducing the low c, but you will hear it, because you can hear the harmonics of that low c, and your brain fills in the "obvious" fundamental tone. which means that we are always "hearing things":) other wierd stuff, like going into an anekoic chamber, and sitting quietly, of which I have not done, but is apparently rather odd. so it is possible that "noise cancelling" which is just enough processing to create a sound wave 180°out of phase to the "noise", could be messing with peoples brains, as it trys to out process the very unnatural digital processing.
As a hyperacusis sufferer that has never used noise-cancelling headphones, I'd have to say 'unlikely', my hyperacusis came with my anxiety - something many of the people in the article have too - and largely seems to be triggered by modern car-focused town design, and constantly being battered by loud engine sounds, revving engines and other annoyances.
i confirm your hypothesis and would like to add myself to your sample.
It seems like you would have to wear them a lot to lose the ability to filter out noise naturally. Five hours seems insufficient, even for a teen. Maybe if you wore it all day? I want noise-canceling headphones that filter out all non-natural sounds. I want to hear the birds but not people talking or leaf blowers or trucks going beep beep beep. Maybe smarter headphones are the answer (besides, of course, making the world not so damn obnoxious).
It's probably just the opposite causation: people sensitive to noise are more likely to spend £250 on noise-cancelling headphones.
What if you don't wear it that many hours but it's all the hours you're in noisy environments? You'd lose the ability to naturally filter the noisy environments because you never experience them.
I have this to far less extremes: I've always sought quiet. There nothing wrong with my hearing as tested. I can't hear people talk very well in any kind of busy situation, and it at least seems to me that other people there aren't struggling. Of course they could be and they just don't say anything about it.
I have the same issue and had it all my life but got a bit worse as I got older. I used to feel ashamed of this but no longer do as I excuse myself from environments that distress me. I’ve been thinking about hearing aids but just like you my hearing is good, it’s a processing issue and am not sure hearing aids could help. Still willing to give them a try, I heard the apple earpods pro are good at filtering out voices from a noise environment.
I suffer from Misophonia and I wear my Bose QC45 10 hours+ a day - each day. Without them I could not function and they made life with Misophonia somewhat tolerable.
Personal anecdote: I have tinnitus and noise-cancelling headphones sets it off worse than regular headphones. As in, I always have a constant low-level ringing, but certain triggers can 10X or 100X the intensity. As a developer, I was a heavy user of noise canceling headphones before this.
> It affected her social life too and Sophie would leave bars and restaurants early because of the "overwhelming noise".
This can also be attributed to enshittification. Restauranteurs and bar owners found that noisier places increase turnover and cause people to drink more.
I can only imagine what happens to your hearing if you work at some of these bars. Long term exposure would wreck your hearing.
Totally this. Acoustics in bars and restaurants has gone completely to shit. Even if they don't turn the music up too loud, it can be extremely hard to have a conversation without shouting, even if the place isn't crowded. I understand the need to not have people linger at a popular spot, but there has to be a better way then to make the place actively unpleasant to be in.
It's also a kind of prisoner's dilemma or positive feedback loop, even without music: people in crowded bars talk loudly (especially with alcohol) which requires people nearby to talk louder to be heard, then it gets even louder and so on.
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And noisy places are cheaper to furnish! Double win
While we're on noise-cancelling headphones, this reminds me of a recent experience on a train (in the quiet carriage, of course) wearing my noise-cancelling headphones. There was a toddler crying and screaming loudly and the sound seemed to cut right through the headphones. I wonder if they're somehow tuned to not block certain sounds (Sony WH-1000XM4).
I think it's more that noise cancellation is more difficult at higher frequencies. You have to match the waveforms much more precisely to get effective cancellation at high frequencies, so active cancellation is mostly going to work in the low range. Works great for a lot of steady machinery sounds like the rumble of a train or airplane, but does little for high-pitched voices.
When I wear Bose noise-cancelling headphones on airplanes I can hear the female flight attendants much better than when I'm not wearing headphones. The noise-cancelling filters out lower frequencies and constant hum (wind, engines), but not the higher-pitched frequencies (which is why the female voices are easier to hear, and, as you mentioned, crying toddlers). So, when the announcement asks people to remove headphones while they explain the security setup it actually has the opposite effect for me - it makes it more difficult to hear what they're saying if I remove my headphones.
Note that there are different kinds of noise-cancelling headphones. The ones pilots wear are different, and then you have those made for hunters - they are focused at reacting very fast to sounds from shooting.
My Sony ones have an actual setting for this, the ambient sound mode has a "focus on voices" option and yes, it does help me pick up voices more clearly than usual if there's background noise.
They're not, it's just the physics of sound cancelation. Some frequencies, especially higher, irregular ones are harder to block, just because the microprocessor doesn't have enough time to react
noise cancelling works best for constant sounds (like the thrum of an engine or a murmur of the crowd) so the anc processor can "compensate" for that sound. If a toddler was crying irregularly, with "wahs" at longer bursts, it's possible that the ANC didn't have time for it's time window to compensate for the sound. Aka the sound started and stopped before a particular time window.
not sure if it is by design, but a larger window would potentially decrease computational load since it doesn't need to recalibrate and reprocess at a higher rate.
Probably white noise would cover those but some people can’t take white noise. I actually love white noise, it calms me and helps me stay focused on the task at hand
I disabled noise-cancelling on my headphones because I actually found it make the sound of my kid crying very uncomfortable.
I honestly think that noise-cancelling is a great idea for a technology, and is basically required from a marketing perspective, but not all that helpful in practice. Sound isolation isn't is sexy, but it works much better.
I would think there'd be a lot of utility in not blocking smoke alarm sounds, for example. The screeching from distressed infants can similarly be both very loud and very high pitched.
Infants scream at the resonant frequency of the human ear canal, about 3000 hz
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Anyone find their tinnitus got a little worse after using noise cancelling headphones?
I have bouts of BPPV like this, an extremely common condition which is vertigo and/or tinnitus due to calcium crystals in the ear interacting with either hearing and/or balance.
I get bouts of this from wearing sealed headphones for too long (not specifically noise cancelling headphones but pretty relevant since noise cancelling headphones almost always form an airtight seal with the ear to work so they too fall into this category).
I think for myself there's certain atmospheric conditions that lead to the otoconia (the crystals that cause it) irritating my hearing and sealed over the ear headphones are a huge cause for me.
Might be worth looking into. The treatment for BPPV is to move your head in specific ways to shake the crystals out which is damn simple to do too so if it is the cause it's actually quite treatable.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-t...
No, the opposite. If I take a long-haul flight (intercontinental) without using noise-cancelling headphones I'll have increased tinnitus for the next month. That problem is greatly reduced if I use the headphones. When that's said, the newer planes like e.g. the Airbus A350, if your're sitting in a reasonably good spot, has vastly less noise than the ones I used to fly in the past (747, for example).
Jets are quite loud inside, much louder than an economy car on the highway.
Didn’t fully appreciate it until I noticed my screaming baby (96 decibels) was inaudible not much more than an arms length away…
I get that feeling too. I have the Samsung Galaxy buds3 pro. They seem to be worse than my Bose 700. After wearing them for a while with NC, I feel like I have to take them off or turn the sound louder. I defaulted to using them with NC off unless I'm in a very loud environment.
Yes! I love my Airpods Max more than any other headphone ever but I wear them all the time and mt tinnitus is crazy. Should stop wearing them, at least reduce.
How high do you have volume when you have the noise cancellation on? I have pretty bad tinnitus and most of my waking hours I have my AirPod Pros in but haven't noticed any increase in my tinnitus.
Absolutely. They probably 10X the intensity of my every-day tinnitus.
Yep, even when they have sound going through them 100% of the time as to not hear my tinnitus. I would expect sudden quiet making me pay attention to it again causing it to be worse but nope, doesn't matter.
Not really but I really only use them for about 30 minutes per day as I go on a walk, so it's not prolonged exposure.
I think many people aren't super interested in hearing. Many times I find repeating things to my younger team members and gradually it started being something.
Not about hearing, I think it's a way of being and trust me I'm not the only one noticing this.
We've even had talks with HR to see how we could adapt as honestly I thought at some point I was the one with challenges transmitting things.
Listening to everyone and everything in many instances is critical to problem solving...
Anyone else?
The rise of video tutorials over written text kinda lets me think that's not a general problem but I've also always preferred written information over audio (in school, in uni, sometimes for talks - not so much for conversations, but even then I have trouble remembering details, compared to reading).
Interesting thinking about this being connected with young people using subtitles all the time. I've been using noise isolating and active noise cancelling earbuds and headphones for a good 20 years while working in noisy cubicle farms, open office plans, and working at home with kids around, and I don't think I have the problems cited here. Is it an age related thing? I didn't start with the headphones until I was in my mid 20's
> Interesting thinking about this being connected with young people using subtitles all the time.
For what it's worth, I've used subtitles whenever possible ever since that became a thing, more or less with the advent of DVDs, which was in my teens to twenties. But I do also have childhood hearing damage in one ear.
> [..] suggests that by blocking everyday sounds such as cars beeping, there is a possibility the brain can "forget" to filter out the noise.
> "You have almost created this false environment by wearing those headphones of only listening to what you want to listen to. You are not having to work at it," she said.
Ah yes, the natural peaceful environment of car horns blowing at >100 decibels.
Look, any research in any medical condition is always useful. But the entire article doesn't mention a word on the real problem: the world has just gotten too damn loud. Car horns are loud enough to cause hearing damage even at short exposure, as is extended exposure to traffic. So yeah, maybe we should primarily be looking at the modern hellscape that we've created instead of looking at the ways people use to manage this.
It wouldn’t surprise me. I can definitely feel a ‘pressurization’ when wearing headphones or earbuds with noise cancellation. That isn’t the “natural” way our ears operate so there must be some side effects. But I wonder if the same would be true for wearing ear plugs or earbuds that don’t have active noise cancellation but sit tightly in your canal.
I feel that 'pressurisation' too with my AirPods Pro (in-ear speakers) - it becomes increasingly uncomfortable, so that after about 20 minutes I have to turn it off. With the same pair of earbuds with noise cancellation off, I don't have the problem.
I like to play white noise or coffee shop ambiance on my noise canceling headphones, I wonder if that helps?
I personally dislike having Bluetooth receivers pressed against my skull or even placing it inside my cavities therefore trying to use it as little as possible.
Overtime I got more electro sensitive and when there are to many wireless devices around me I get a type of temporary tinnitus which persist for a while. Grounding myself helps to relieve it.
I mean think about it couple of decades ago there wasn’t even one wireless device around now I receive alone 40 router signals in my apartment building. When everybody is at home in the evening I feel the electro smog tinnitus the strongest.
I blame it on ear buds and high volume.
Edit: But the article is also about understanding speech in a noisy area. Wouldn't ADDH be a big factor ?
Their hearing is fine. The processing is wonky.
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