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Topic: "Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies (Read 7569 times) previous topic - next topic
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"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Hi! I searched for a thread with a similar topic but I found none.

Since a car accident in 2004 I suffer from tinnitus and hearing disability both on my left ear and I can't do anything about it. As a result music sounds louder on my right ear and I usually balance the music to be louder on the left side, but results are not satisfying. 

Can I somehow only make the frequencies that are damaged louder? Will this "cancel out" the hearing disability?
Since I listen to music mostly with my FLAC library with foobar2000 I would search for an equalizer that can be applied to only the left channel. Will this have the desired results? 

Why can I ABX aoTuV b5a [20080330] at Q5 and sometimes even Q6 on everydaymusic when I listen carefully when others without hearing disability say they can not ABX Q4? 

I appreciate any help.

Kwinz

---
Klick here for hearing test picture
(lower line applies, tinnitus is somewhere at 6kHz)

"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Reply #1 –
Quote from: Kwinz on
Can I somehow only make the frequencies that are damaged louder? Will this "cancel out" the hearing disability?

To some extent it should work. But it may also do more damage, so I'd be very careful with this.

I'm no expert on this but I would have expected that you got accustomed to this condition by now and that the brain is somehow compensating for it in terms of perceived loudness & timbre.  I myself had some vision problems (cateract at a rather early age) and I was surprized about the big difference I experienced after surgery. I guess my brain partly accounted for this condition and it still ran in its "sharpening post processing mode" for a few days after the surgery -- edges and details were emphasized.

Quote from: Kwinz on
Why can I ABX aoTuV b5a [20080330] at Q5 and sometimes even Q6 on everydaymusic when I listen carefully when others without hearing disability say they can not ABX Q4? 

Actually this isn't the first time I heard about a person with a hearing disability scoring pretty high on those kinds of tests. My guess would be that the sound within the frequency range you're not hearing so well doesn't mask the compression artefacts in the neighbouring frequency regions as well as expected by the lossy encoders. This is similar to applying heavy equilization after lossy compression.

Cheers,
SG

"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Reply #2 –
Quote from: SebastianG on
To some extent it should work. But it may also do more damage, so I'd be very careful with this.

I have to be careful, but I think it will be ok, if I lower the overall volume.

Quote from: SebastianG on
I'm no expert on this but I would have expected that you got accustomed to this condition by now and that the brain is somehow compensating for it in terms of perceived loudness & timbre.


Actually it WAS a lot worse after the accident and the hearing test scan above is from this week.
Under normal conditions, I can surpress the tinnitus noise. Only if the tinnitus comes into my mind or if I am in a noisy environment (e.g. blowing dry my hair) the tinnitus gets much louder.
To cut a long story short, the "software" tinnitus correction is doing quite well. What stays is the deafness at 6kHz.

So can the one-sideded equalizing be done with foobar?

Quote from: SebastianG on
Actually this isn't the first time I heard about a person with a hearing disability scoring pretty high on those kinds of tests. My guess would be that the sound within the frequency range you're not hearing so well doesn't mask the compression artefacts in the neighbouring frequency regions as well as expected by the lossy encoders. This is similar to applying heavy equilization after lossy compression.

Interesting theory. It could also be about stereo effects. I'm no pro in lossy encoding technologies, but I can remember that an ATRAC3 encoded music sounds awful, if you listen to it with only one ear.

Cheers,
Kwinz

"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Reply #3 –
I can’t vouch for the validity of this, but I know there have been Tomatis clinics all over the world for quite a while. The Jourdy materials have been in use for more than 20 years and are quite a bit less expensive than the clinics. You can see tinnitus relief as one of the claimed benefits. In fact they have published a separate book on tinnitus. Maybe it would seem interesting enough, under the circumstances, for you to test ... and perhaps report back in a few months.
http://www.toolsforwellness.com/patriciajoudry.html

"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Reply #4 –
I read of a blind MP3 / ABX audition in Germany (by ct magazine) some time ago - and I believe that the person who 'did the best' in the evaluation also had hearing damage in one or both ears at specific frequencies.  This concurs with SebastianG's statement.

That "Tools For Wellness" CD sounds (pardon the pun), interesting as well...

Andrew D.
www.cdnav.com

"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Reply #5 –
If you cannot find the equalizer you think you need I could write one.

"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Reply #6 –
Quote from: AndyH-ha on
I can’t vouch for the validity of this, but I know there have been Tomatis clinics all over the world for quite a while. The Jourdy materials have been in use for more than 20 years and are quite a bit less expensive than the clinics. You can see tinnitus relief as one of the claimed benefits. In fact they have published a separate book on tinnitus. Maybe it would seem interesting enough, under the circumstances, for you to test ... and perhaps report back in a few months.
http://www.toolsforwellness.com/patriciajoudry.html


That's intersting, because the homepage of my local tomatis institute states, that tomatis training has to be done with special headphones with bone conduction that are licenced only to tomatis institutes.

Quote from: SpasV on
If you cannot find the equalizer you think you need I could write one.

I've been looking through several foobar pluginsites, in particular this site reading through the component descriptions. Seems there is no foobar plugin available, although I did not try out most of them, if the component description was not promising.
I finally ended up with George Yohng's VST Wrapper (foo_dsp_vstwrap). There is a variety of VST equalizers and I found one that can do simple left/right equalizing.
My vague guess is that implementing a native foobar 1-channel-only equalizer by modifiying the original should not take more than 50 lines of code.

Cheers,
Kwinz

"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Reply #7 –
If my memories don't fail me, the approach you want to follow is likewise
implemented in hearing aids, but within these there are also measures to
prevent from excessive loudness which would cause further damage.
So you would also need some limiting (simple) or dynamic range
compression (more complex) for the specific bands you are interested in.
Or, like Sebastian wrote, just be careful :-)

"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Reply #8 –
The analysis you attached is very interesting. I also notice some differences between my ears when I try a mono pink  noise in each one, but nothing was wrong  in my last hearing medical test apparently. But it don't harm my musical enjoyment, I think the brain takes care of that nicely, without my intervention.
About your talent, maybe is similar to my vision: I do need glasses but my doctor says that in fact my vision is better than normal, have more detail or definition, I can almost read the copyrigth line in the test poster. So the partial dissability that make me use glasses has nothing to do with my ability.
I don't have any advices just sharing my experience, check with your doctor before you do anything. But if you need to implement different corrections for each side try the Stereo Convolver and make an impulse file for each side. I don't know the details but it can work.
Regards.

"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Reply #9 –
There is a Tomatis business model to protect that means conflict with the several Tomatis disciples who have gone on separate paths.

Having a tiny person in the family who seemed to be having hearing and speech difficulties, I talked to a number of people about sound therapy and some of its offs-shoots. The nearest Tomatis clinic is not very close, but its director gave me some telephone time on a few occasions. Before setting up her clinic to treat children having difficulties developing the use of speech, she was Chief of Speech Pathology at UC Davis Medical Center. Tinnitus was not a part of our discussion.

There are a couple parts of the Tomatis treatment that cannot be done with one-size-fits-all recordings, but they are a small part, at least time wise, and are largely oriented to dealing with speech difficulties and voice training. For such problems, the personal attention of a speech therapist is probably also of major benefit.

The Sound Therapy recordings were made on Tomatis equipment, so the claim is that they do not differ from the in-house audio. According to their literature, tinnitus is not one of the symptoms that requires more than the recordings can provide. Of course, as I already stated, I don’t know that this, or anything else is actually helpful, I just note the claims, and the fact that it all sounds rather interesting.

"Cancel out" hearing disability on specific frequencies

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Kwinz on
Hi! I searched for a thread with a similar topic but I found none.

Since a car accident in 2004 I suffer from tinnitus and hearing disability both on my left ear and I can't do anything about it. As a result music sounds louder on my right ear and I usually balance the music to be louder on the left side, but results are not satisfying. 

Can I somehow only make the frequencies that are damaged louder? Will this "cancel out" the hearing disability?
Since I listen to music mostly with my FLAC library with foobar2000 I would search for an equalizer that can be applied to only the left channel. Will this have the desired results? 

Why can I ABX aoTuV b5a [20080330] at Q5 and sometimes even Q6 on everydaymusic when I listen carefully when others without hearing disability say they can not ABX Q4? 

I appreciate any help.

Kwinz


Here is what I did so that each ear sounds the same when I listen using headphones (my left ear has various degrees of frequency loss).  I set up a stereo EQ - in my case Shibatch on Winamp.  Then I played a hearing test CD through the left headphones and winamp EQ.  I adjusted the EQ to compensate for each hearing frequency loss using the EQ (The EQ can be assigned frequencies to match the hearing test).  Now each frequency has the same volume level on the left side.  Some are WAY up above 0 level - but now I hear them as the same volume as the other frequencies. 

I believe my left ear has compensated in some strange ways, because it is ULTRA sensitive to other frequencies I had to turn down.  At least that is the perception on the hearing test.

When I test using mono through my headphones (mono), the left ear sounds almost the same as the right ear.  Humorously, If I put the left phone on my right ear, it sounds awful.  Then I adjust the volume on the left side as needed to balance the right.  This is the best and quickest solution for everyday listening.  I don't know if this could be done on a portable or not, but it works great on my PC.

I got the idea from here and made it work for me - good luck

http://shibatch.sourceforge.net/eq/index.html