Member
- Posts: 386
- Joined: Tue Jun 19, 2007 6:23 pm
- Location: Calne, Wiltshire, UK
I have some high-frequency hearing loss resulting from a combination of noise exposure when I was younger (this gives a very characteristic loss at 4 KHZ and I think I can trace it from a single event when I was a teenager) and more recent damage resulting from chemotherapy, which has affected higher frequencies. There is also probably an age-related element as I am sixty now. It is rather ironic that I have been prescribing cisplatin (a chemotherapy drug) for many years during my career as an oncologist, taking great pains to minimise its serious toxicities (early and delayed vomiting, kidney failure and immunosuppression) while only being peripherally aware of its almost universal effects on hearing and taste, until I experienced these for myself. Unfortunately the hearing loss is delayed and often doesn't start until the chemotherapy is complete.
I have recently started wearing hearing aids. These were supplied free of charge by the NHS, and would have cost me about £3,000 - 3,500 were I to have bought them privately. They clearly perform some quite sophisticated digital processing, including suppression of background noise and directional preference (which can be controlled via an iPhone app) to enable me to concentrate on one speaker among several. They selectively amplify the frequencies that I am missing, and the audiologist took measurements inside my ear canals in order to tailor them more precisely to my own hearing.
There is no doubt that they do a very good job of improving the intelligibility of speech, which is, after all, what they are designed to do. However, they are less satisfactory when it comes to music, despite having a specific music setting. Prior to using them I would find it difficult to get a balance when choosing registration, and at times I would find it difficult to hear all the parts when I was playing polyphonic music. They help with that, and also they have restored the tinkling and almost percussive effect of upperwork stops such as the Cymbal, which brings back memories of hearing Peter Hurford play on the Mittenreiter-Flentrop organ in Eton School Hall when I was a student there (an interesting instrument rebuilt in 1974 after the original Dutch pipes were retrieved from a Hope-Jones monstrosity from the 1920's that had never worked properly and used to give the organist electric shocks).
However, there is one very strange and annoying effect, which I think must be an anti-feedback mechanism. When the hearing aids detect a sustained signal at a pitch close to the natural feedback frequency of the system (i.e. the whistling that I am sure you have all heard with other people's hearing aids), after about a second the amplified sound is shifted down in pitch by about 1% (with a bit of experimentation I found I could readily reporduce this by playing middle C with a 2-foot stop). This is very effective in breaking the feedback cycle, but the pitch-shifted sound mixes with the unprocessed sound coming into the ear canal and the result is beating in the notes. For most types of music this doesn't seem to be particularly intrusive, but it makes a piano sound out-of-tune, and the effect on an organ is a fluttering which resembles a problem with regulation of the wind supply.
I have gone back to Specsavers, who supplied the aids, and saw a technician there who is apparently some sort of musician himself, but he didn't seem to understand what I was talking about. I also found it rather frustrating that every time I have been there I have been rather talked down to - as a doctor with 30 years' clinical experience I am not used to being treated this way by other healthcare professionals, and although I don't have any training as a sound engineer I do have a certain amount of relevant technical knowledge.
One other lesser problem it that with the hearing aids I lose the sense of "presence" that has taken me a lot of trouble to get right when it comes to surround organs such as Groningen. I suspect that this is something to do with the audio processing aimed at maximising intelligibility of speech, though I suppose it might be that the microphone in these devices doesn't sit in the same position as the entrance to the ear canal and therefore isn't influenced in the same way by the shape of the pinna (external ear), which normally provides information about the direction of sounds (along with intensity for high frequencies and timing for lower frequencies up to about 1 KHz - I have always found it amazing that the human ear can detect timing differences in the range 1 - 5 ms in the arrival of sound between the two ears; when I was an undergraduate studying physiology we did a practical experiment involving clicks delivered via headphones with variable timing between the two ears - longer than 5 ms and they would be hears as two separate clicks, but for shorter delays the timing determined the perceived direction of the click down to 1 ms).
The hearing aids are made by Signia, and the model is Contrast S+. Rather frustratingly I can find very little technical information about them on the internet.
I am very grateful to the NHS for supplying such sophisticated devices free of charge, as I am for all the other health care that I have needed recently. However, I know that there are other types of hearing aid available to purchase privately (at huge expense, of course) and of course I am wondering whether there are any that are designed specifically for music rather than speech. Given the widespread problem of occupational noise exposure among musicians I would have thought that there would be a significant demand for this sort of device, and for hearing services aimed at musicians.
I don't suppose I am the only HW user with hearing loss, and I would be very interested to know what other people's experience has been.
I have recently started wearing hearing aids. These were supplied free of charge by the NHS, and would have cost me about £3,000 - 3,500 were I to have bought them privately. They clearly perform some quite sophisticated digital processing, including suppression of background noise and directional preference (which can be controlled via an iPhone app) to enable me to concentrate on one speaker among several. They selectively amplify the frequencies that I am missing, and the audiologist took measurements inside my ear canals in order to tailor them more precisely to my own hearing.
There is no doubt that they do a very good job of improving the intelligibility of speech, which is, after all, what they are designed to do. However, they are less satisfactory when it comes to music, despite having a specific music setting. Prior to using them I would find it difficult to get a balance when choosing registration, and at times I would find it difficult to hear all the parts when I was playing polyphonic music. They help with that, and also they have restored the tinkling and almost percussive effect of upperwork stops such as the Cymbal, which brings back memories of hearing Peter Hurford play on the Mittenreiter-Flentrop organ in Eton School Hall when I was a student there (an interesting instrument rebuilt in 1974 after the original Dutch pipes were retrieved from a Hope-Jones monstrosity from the 1920's that had never worked properly and used to give the organist electric shocks).
However, there is one very strange and annoying effect, which I think must be an anti-feedback mechanism. When the hearing aids detect a sustained signal at a pitch close to the natural feedback frequency of the system (i.e. the whistling that I am sure you have all heard with other people's hearing aids), after about a second the amplified sound is shifted down in pitch by about 1% (with a bit of experimentation I found I could readily reporduce this by playing middle C with a 2-foot stop). This is very effective in breaking the feedback cycle, but the pitch-shifted sound mixes with the unprocessed sound coming into the ear canal and the result is beating in the notes. For most types of music this doesn't seem to be particularly intrusive, but it makes a piano sound out-of-tune, and the effect on an organ is a fluttering which resembles a problem with regulation of the wind supply.
I have gone back to Specsavers, who supplied the aids, and saw a technician there who is apparently some sort of musician himself, but he didn't seem to understand what I was talking about. I also found it rather frustrating that every time I have been there I have been rather talked down to - as a doctor with 30 years' clinical experience I am not used to being treated this way by other healthcare professionals, and although I don't have any training as a sound engineer I do have a certain amount of relevant technical knowledge.
One other lesser problem it that with the hearing aids I lose the sense of "presence" that has taken me a lot of trouble to get right when it comes to surround organs such as Groningen. I suspect that this is something to do with the audio processing aimed at maximising intelligibility of speech, though I suppose it might be that the microphone in these devices doesn't sit in the same position as the entrance to the ear canal and therefore isn't influenced in the same way by the shape of the pinna (external ear), which normally provides information about the direction of sounds (along with intensity for high frequencies and timing for lower frequencies up to about 1 KHz - I have always found it amazing that the human ear can detect timing differences in the range 1 - 5 ms in the arrival of sound between the two ears; when I was an undergraduate studying physiology we did a practical experiment involving clicks delivered via headphones with variable timing between the two ears - longer than 5 ms and they would be hears as two separate clicks, but for shorter delays the timing determined the perceived direction of the click down to 1 ms).
The hearing aids are made by Signia, and the model is Contrast S+. Rather frustratingly I can find very little technical information about them on the internet.
I am very grateful to the NHS for supplying such sophisticated devices free of charge, as I am for all the other health care that I have needed recently. However, I know that there are other types of hearing aid available to purchase privately (at huge expense, of course) and of course I am wondering whether there are any that are designed specifically for music rather than speech. Given the widespread problem of occupational noise exposure among musicians I would have thought that there would be a significant demand for this sort of device, and for hearing services aimed at musicians.
I don't suppose I am the only HW user with hearing loss, and I would be very interested to know what other people's experience has been.