Comment by spauldo
10 days ago
I have that issue as well - I can hear faint noises OK but if there's background noise I can't understand what people say. But I'm pretty sure there's a physical issue at the root of it in my case. The problem showed up after several practice sessions with a band whose guitarist insisted on always playing at full volume.
I'd love your thoughts on why it might be hardware. I reason that my hearing is generally fine - there's no issue picking apart loud complex music (I love breakcore!).
But play two songs at the same time, or try talking to me with significant background noise, and I seem to be distinctly impaired vs. most others.
If I concentrate, I can sometimes work through it.
My uninformed model is a pipeline of sorts, and some sort of pre-processing isn't turned on. So the stuff after it has a much harder job.
I don't have much beyond what I said. It happened to me after repeated exposure to dangerously loud sounds in a small room. I can hear faint sounds, but I have trouble with strong accents and I can't understand words if there's a lot of background noise. I noticed it shortly after I left that band, and I left because the last practice was so loud it felt like a drill boring into my ears.
I don't think I have any harder time appreciating complex music than I did before, but I'm more of a 60s-70s rock kinda guy and a former bass player, so I tend to focus more on the low end. Bass tends to be less complex because you can't fit as much signal into the waveform without getting unpleasant muddling.
And of course, just because we have similar symptoms doesn't mean the underlying causes are the same. My grandfather was hard of hearing so for all I know it's genetic and the timing was a coincidence. Who knows?
It seems to me your ability to discriminate has been impacted.
I have always pictured it working this way:
In the Cochlea, we have all the fine hair like sensors. The spread of them determines our range of frequencies, and this declines with age. Usually not too much, but could be as much as half. 10 to 12khz.
Good news in that is all the good stuff we crave is below 10khz. Don't sweat age related hearing loss too much.
The number of these sensors determines our ability to hear concurrent sounds, or complexity.
The shape of them impacts how loud sounds need to be to be heard.
Chances are, your loud exposure had harmonics that impacted many of these sensing hairs, but not in one place. The result is a loss of discrimination of concurrent sounds.
There are plenty to cover the frequency range, so things do not seem muffled or low. Their shape is good, not worn so you hear faint sounds well.
The lower number of them is the issue. Or, they are still there, just bent-- something prevents them from contrubuting.
Another way to think of this is in reverse:
Say you had 30 oscillators you could start at any frequency and time. How complex of a sound could you make? Now cut that in half.
What is lost?
The most complex, concurrent sound cases.
> I have that issue as well
You say issue, I say feature. It's a great way to just ignore boring babbling at parties or other social engagements where you're just not that engaged. Sort of like selective hearing in relationships, but used on a wider audience
I don’t mean to speak for OP, but it strikes me as rude to make light of someone’s disability in this way. I’d guess it has caused them a lot of frustration.
Your assumption leads you to believe that I do not also suffer from the same issue. Ever since I was in a t-bone accident and the side airbag went off right next to my head, I have a definite issue hearing voices in crowded and noisy rooms with poor sound insulation. Some rooms are much worse than others.
So when I say I call it a feature, it's something I actually deal with unlike your uncharitable assumption.
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It's not so great when I'm standing right next to my technician in a pumphouse and I can't understand what he's trying to say to me.