I guess the years of working around computer servers must be catching up with me. Servers have multiple cooling fans and multiple hard drives. There’s a lot of high pitched noise. I was foolish to allow the dept server in my office.
For me, it’s the fast food order intercoms. I ordered a double cheeseburger and tots at Sonic. I would have sworn he said $6.36 on the speaker. I counted out the money (exact change) and was ready. The kid comes out. $6.46. Now I have to frantically dig out another dime as he waits. :rolleyes:
Seems like I usually get it wrong by a dime or a couple pennies. I’ve paid for fast food with exact change all my life. It’s frustrating.
I can still tune my guitar. I use a tuning fork. You listen for the resonant pitch (the difference between the two frequencies). That’s a low pitch and I hear it ok. At least, I think I do.
I’m starting to wonder about hearing loss myself. I work on a computer, and my job involves listening to phone calls, so I’m wearing a headset. I have the computer volume and the QA program volume all the way up, and sometimes I still have trouble understanding what is being said.
High frequency sounds where I have a 40% loss. I can’t hear most whistles or whispering at all. Funny, sometimes a person will want to whisper something to me and it’s like what, what? I really have great difficulty with quiet conversation, normal volume is OK but quiet speaking across a room, no way.
The last time I took a hearing test, it showed a noticeable roll-off at about 11 khz. That’s perfectly fine for most normal needs, but losing those higher frequencies is starting to screw up differentiating betwen “f”, “s”, “th” and “v”, for example.
My parents once got into a hilarious argument based on confusing “at home” with “alone.”
Certain male voices register in my “deaf” range. If they happen to be soft-spoken or are whispering, I find myself relying on reading their lips to understand them. This is compounded whenever I’m in a very noisy place, like a bar or restaurant, and especially if that noisy place has a lot of hard surfaces and poor acoustics so sound bounces around all over the place. Music, voices, glasses clinking… I can’t hear a damn thing.
And no, I’m still in denial and haven’t gotten my hearing tested. After 40 years of going to motorcycle races, car races, and about 25 years of loud rock concerts… I don’t need testing to know I have significant hearing loss. I can tell because I’ve learned to read lips without realizing that’s what I was doing! I’m just not ready to be that middle-aged old lady with a fucking hearing aid. :: sob ::
For me, it’s women’s voices when they sing. My family likes to go to the occasional musical. But if they have a woman singing, especially one with a higher voice, I’m lost. I don’t hear words, I just hear a voice singing something unintelligible. Think of Harry Chapin’s song “Taxi” and the part done by Big John Wallace. The link takes you there, and you can hear Big John at about 3:40. For years, I had no clue what he was singing. I had to finally look it up online to get it.
And on a side note - when I clicked on the link to sign on and post a reply to this thread, I got a popup ad from some survey outfit, and it read, "BE HEARD!! Nice timing, guys!
And on another side note - the anniversary of Harry’s death is coming up - July 16th, about a month away. Harry, the cheap seats still remember.
I have a noticeable roll off in the high registers particularly on the right side… I don’t notice it in life except for when I’m trying to follow a conversation in a noisy environment such as a bar. Hearing damage was probably caused by years of playing my electric guitar with the amp pointed at my right ear.
I have been tested, and have a mild hearing loss in both ears. I am just mild enough to not need hearing aids, but bad enough to misunderstand things.
It gets bad in the car, when I am driving and the kids are talking to me. If I can’t see them talk (and read the lips, I suppose), I will misunderstand what they said. It is rather hilarious at some times when I THINK they said one thing, when infact, they said something totally different. We laugh alot about this. (ie: they say: let’s go to the mall. I hear: have a ball. So, I will continue the conversation with “how so?”. They will scratch their heads, and say “uh, I dunno Mom, in the CAR?” I am not getting it yet, and am trying to figure out how to have a ball [a fun time] in the car. After a few more minutes, one of the kids figures out that Mom heard wrong… MALL mom. M.A.L.L. the place to SHOP. OHHHHHH… why didn’t you say that in the first place.)
Yeah, stuff like this happens quite often for me. We enjoy it. Yes, sometimes I will prolong the misunderstanding, just to annoy them, and to get them to ennunciate their words clearer for their deaf Mom.
How coincidental - I went to the audiologist last week and he recommended hearing aids. My hearing has always been lousy, even in high school. But it’s gotten to be a running joke in my office about how I can’t hear anything, and I’m having to watch TV with the closed captioning on to catch all the dialogue. Still, my insurance will only pay 80% up to $500 per ear, which won’t buy much of a hearing aid. I haven’t figured out yet what I’m going ot do.
The high frequencies are the first to go, and the consonants in speech tend to be higher in frequency than the vowels, so an early sign is having trouble understanding speech. “I can hear you, but I can’t understand what you’re saying” becomes a common complaint.
I’ve noticed that I can’t understand what they’re saying on ‘Doctor Who’ anymore unless I turn up the volume.
TV is where I most notice it. There are a lot of shows that I have to repeat watch, or turn on captioning to understand what is being said. Dr Who is one of them, complicated by the accents and idioms with which I’m not familiar.
Funny story-you don’t need to have particularly good hearing to be a phonetician (sound-y parts of language guy) but it certainly helps, and there are some applied areas, like fieldwork, where it can be a big plus.
Regardless of their personal area of interest, basically any major the linguistics department where I did my undergrad who had a good ear or showed particular aptitude for discerning phonemes in speech was encouraged to take some of the advanced phonetics courses. This brings us to the first day of Acoustic Physics for Phoneticians. The lights in our class were off when we arrived, and since it was more of an auditorium than a classroom we had to call for maintainence and wait for someone with keys to come and unlock the panel that let us operate the huge banks of fluorescent lights. They slowly flick on over a minute or so, but apparently the ballast in one of the lights was off, as the room was instantly filled with a very high-pitched screeching noise. Cue 50-60 students flinching, wincing, cringing, or otherwise showing discomfort while the maintainence guy and the professor stared at us curiously.
Turns out neither of them could hear it, which is not uncommon- even a lot of guys in their late teens and early 20s can’t hear very high-pitched whining from flourescent lights or the like. What was more amusing was that nobody had complained before- apparently we were the first class to pack enough people capable of hearing the noise into one room long enough for us to complain out loud.
For the most part I can do fine - no diagnosed loss… but I noticed a while back that when I was using my iPod as a sleep aid, the volume setting varied depending on which ear. At first I thought it was a bad connection on the earbud but then I tried switching ears from the headphones and yep, it’s me.
Not too bad - say, the volume has to be 1 in one ear and 2 in the other…
My parents have one of those lamps that can be dimmed anywhere from full on to off. Full on or off is fine; ANY level of dimming and the lamp produces this high-pitched hum that neither of them can hear.
Walking into a Walgreens, I could hear this high-pitched hum (I’m not sure if it was that mosquito whine teen deterrent or not) and while I’d walked in planning to buy a couple things, I turned on my heel and went elsewhere.
I have a very slight dip around 11k I think, but everywhere else my hearing’s just fine. I still have problems understanding what people are saying but it’s the vowels I mishear. Weird.
I somehow managed to have less hearing loss than most people my age (late 30s). It’s not like I was really careful as a kid. I don’t know how I did it.
However, one set of circumstances just absolutely drives me up the wall: trying to listen to one person talk when other people around are also talking. And the thing is, if it’s normal conversation tones, it doesn’t bother me. It’s when the other people are trying to be quiet.
It’s gotten to where, if I’m subbing in a classroom and taking roll, I explain up front that I need the students to be completely quiet while I take roll, and when they do inevitably whisper to each other, I have to stop until they’re silent again. It’s a pain.
