Sometimes I go to sleep with music from my iPod playing softly through small ear buds. Occasionally I become aware during the night that I don’t hear music any more. Invariably this turns out to be when I’m sleeping on my right side with my head pressing down on the pillow, which presses the ear bud a bit father in than it normally goes. When I pull out the ear bud a little, the sound returns.
The thing is, the sound disappears from both ears. Even more strangely, I’ve noticed that when I lay on my left side and a similar event happens, the sound only disappears from my left ear, not both.
Why would this happen at all? And why would the sound seem to disappear from only one ear in one case, and entirely in another?
What I’'ve thought of:
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The ear bud actually presses into my eardrum and stops if from vibrating.
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The movement of the bud, and it’s seal in the ear canal, makes a partial vacuum if the bud is pulled slightly out, and there’s not enough air in between the bud and the drum to transmit the sound.
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One bud gets pushed to a just different enough distance from the eardrum than in the other ear resulting in phase cancellation and the apparent disappearing of the sound in both ears.
However, none of these 3 explanations does anything to explain why things would be different when the bud is pressed into my left rather than my right ear.
#1 --just seems altogether unlikely as by now it would seem I should have damaged my hearing if that was really happening.
#2 --I doubt there’s a good enough seal, or that the silicone bud being moved a couple of millimeters could create enough of a vacuum for this to happen.
#3 --Almost all my music is stereo, and phase cancellation doesn’t work very well unless the same mono signal is going to both buds. At best it would cause rapid volume changes as some of the signal canceled and other parts didn’t.
Any ideas here?