Hearing Informed

- I was recently listening to a local radio station here in the San Francisco Bay Area, KPFA, and I heard something that got me thinking. The host was mentioning how much attention KPFA pays to sound quality- something you’d expect from a medium that deals entirely in sound. Moreover, the show receives phone calls all the time from guests and the sound quality tends to be anywhere on the poor to lousy side (guests call on their cell phones with frequent poor reception).

So one day the the host received a personal call from his wife and was shocked at how clear and vivid the sound of her voice seemed. Outside of talking to his wife in person- he hadn’t ever experienced her voice (or anybody elses) so clearly over the phone before. He asked what she was calling on. It turned out she had bought an old rotary phone from a thrift store and was calling him on that. The analogue sound quality over that rotary phone was far better than any modern touch phone or cell phone in existence…

- I love the raw and warm sound from cigar box guitars.. I’ve been inspired by Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing.com to make my own guitar one of these days. With the guidance from Bill Jehle’s excellent DVD: How to Build a Guitar: the String Stick Box Method and the social network of cigar box guitar makers at Cigar Box Nation, I’m hoping to take on building one of my own soon.

-If you haven’t heard of them- please check out SolarEar. They are an amazing company that manufactures and designs the first solar powered hearing aid. They education, train, and hire young deaf people to make the devices. I’m the voice of their twitter account: http://twitter.com/SolarEar.

“The Center for Medical Device Innovations Inc, Dublin, Calif, introduces iHear Medical, established to develop new hearing enhancement devices for treating hearing losses from mild to severe impairments.

Medical device entrepreneur Adnan Shennib, founder of InSound Medical and inventor of its flagship product the Lyric, has also founded iHear.”

We are going to hear more about iHear in the next couple of weeks. I’m going to be discussing the future of hearing aid technology with Adnan Shennib on HearingInformed.org. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve written about the Lyric here before.

“”I’m not as concerned with my voice as I am with my lisp that I have, you know, because I’m partially deaf.  And I was born that way, and it doesn’t mean that I have a speech impediment; it’s just that I don’t hear S’s.  My wife always tells me, when I’m singing “Mood for Love,” I’d say, ‘You give me a smile,’ and it sounds like you’re saying, ‘You give me a mile.’ ”

-James Moody, Saxophonist.

James Moody, the prolific saxophonist and flutist, with a killer voice too- passed away last month at the age of 85. NPR recently replayed an old interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air in remembrance. It was interesting to learn that Mr. Moody was born with a hearing impairment and he absolutely hated wearing his hearing aids when playing the Sax. I have to agree with him- but for a slightly different reason. I think a lot of modern DSP processing in hearing aids today get in the way of good music listening- unlike the analogue aids of his day. I also admire his perspective..Here is a snippet of the transcript:

GROSS: How old were you when you realized you had a hearing problem?

Mr. MOODY: I was born that way, and I never realized it. I still haven’t realized it because I hear what I hear, and that’s it. See, if you don’t know what you’re missing, how can you say what I miss, you know what I mean?

They were insistent that I wear a hearing aid because I would hear so much better, and I put this hearing aid on, and I’m telling you, I thought I was going to go nuts with the clanging and banging that I hear, you know, banging, and you could hear the tires of the car. I said: Oh my goodness, if people hear this. I mean, it’s nerve-wracking.

So what I did was I turned it off. And they said: Oh, isn’t that much better? I said: It certainly is.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. MOODY: You heard that joke, didn’t you, Terry, about the guy says: Oh man, he says, boy, I just spent $4,000 on this wonderful hearing aid, you know. And the guy said: Yeah? What kind is it? The guy said: It’s 12 o’clock.

(Soundbite of laughter)

GROSS: It took me a second, right. So did music sound different with the hearing aid?

Mr. MOODY: Oh, I wouldn’t dare do that. I wouldn’t dare put a hearing aide on and play music because if I put the hearing aid in, then it’s banging and clanging again, or clinking, yeah.

Hello All- I’ve been away from writing on HearingInformed for too long. Thank You to all the people from around the world who continue to visit my site (a couple of thousand a month). I’m thrilled that visitors are coming in from places like India, Ukraine, Malaysia, Brazil.. almost every continent. This shouldn’t be too surprising considering that WHO estimates there to be 600 million people who worldwide who are hearing impaired. That number will only be growing.

I have several continuing and new projects that I’m excited about:

-Contracting with Apple to help develop very professional online tutorials that show people how to use their products http://www.apple.com/ipad/guided-tours/. Great to work with so many smart people

-Volunteering with Solar Ear, an amazing NGO that manufactures and designs the worlds first solar rechargeable hearing aid. I assist them with strategic global marketing and social media. I’m exciting to be helping them raise a school for the Deaf and DR Congo: http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/health-and-education-children-who-are-deaf-drcongo/

-Consulting with a real estate company to design an internal GIS mapping database that assists them with investment opportunities and future clients. It’s very fun to apply GIS technology to a field outside of geology.

And for the blog I’m hoping to tackle a couple of big subjects:

-Insurance coverage for hearing aids (the lack of). Arggh. This is a very personal and frustrating area for me. There still isn’t very wide-spread coverage for hearing aids in existence outside of the Veterans Office.

-I’m going to work on setting up an FM system in my car. One of the worst places to hear is in the car and i’m hell bent on trying to use technology thats been around for quite a while. Im hoping to set up microphones and an FM receiver that will directly port sound into my hearing aids through a DAI or telecoil.

-I have more to say about cheap hearing aids vs. expensive ones. In a lot of cases I’m not convinced that more expensive aids are necessarily better. I’m doing a little experiment to compare my pricier aids with cheaper ones in a sound booth and out in the real world.

-Where is the future of hearing aids? There are a lot of exciting changes that lie ahead and I’ll be posting a series of interviews with folks that have lead the way in the hearing aid industry so far.

-Transpositioning. I continue to be a huge fan of the technology and I’ll have more to say about that. As a part of that discussion I’m going to append my review of the Widex Passions that I wear.

It will be a good year.

Dave

“Kids around the country are getting high on the internet, thanks to MP3s that induce a state of ecstasy. And it could be a gateway drug leading teens to real-world narcotics.

At least, that’s what Oklahoma News 9 is reporting about a phenomenon called “i-dosing,” which involves finding an online dealer who can hook you up with “digital drugs” that get you high through your headphones.

And officials are taking it seriously.”

Phonak has an interesting section on their website dedicated to the question: what does  hearing loss sound like? I’ve gotten this question many times. They made a series of demos that roughly simulate what normal, mild, and moderate hearing losses sound like. I like that they sample a wide series of environments. The nitty gritty algorithms behind these are from decades ago. I put a pair of headphones on and check these out. I have to admit- they are half way decent- and somewhat accurate.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been frustrated listening to my voicemails- unable to make out an important number or name that I need to jot down. I’ve been hoping that software to transcribe voice to text was going to get good enough so that I might actually use it. Its now becoming a reality.

James Martin over at PC World loves the voice-to-text transcription service at jott.com. He started using the service to record himself memos, reminders, and ideas with his cell phone. Jott.com transcribes the emails and sends them to you.

Jott.com recently started offering an extremely useful voicemail-to-text service. Martin found that the accuracy is pretty good, most of the time. Its also described as fast. There are certainly some rooms for improvement. The transcription service is a bit expensive- $10/month for 40 messages- and the service is limited to one phone.

There are other services out there: Google Voice offers a free transcription service, GotVoice gives you two weeks to try the service free, and Phonetag is worth looking at as well.

A hearing aid that fits on your teeth? Thats what Sonitus Medical has been working on for the past few years. The novel approach blends several technologies to solve the problem of single-sided conduction hearing loss. Essentially, this aid will help those who are deaf in one ear.

The patient will wear a behind the ear hearing that receives sound through microphones and transmits that sound wirelessly to an in-the-mouth (ITM) device.

The non-surgical in-the-mouth device takes the form of a dental grade acrylic that embeds a battery, a wireless receiver, and an actuator that transmits the sound from a behind the ear hearing aid directly to the cochlea.

(more…)

Neil Hunt, CEO of Netflix, recently announced that Netflix will now begin to roll out captions for streaming movies. As of right now there are only about 100 titles that feature the closed captioning, and there is no obvious way to see which movie titles they are. Its a start and I hope they keep rolling out captions on all their movies.

[Netflix Blog]

From Gizmodo:

The Hifiman HM-801 looks like an old portable cassette player, but apparently it might just beat out most music players in sound quality. At least that’s what CNET though when they had a listen. They even found it worth $790.

The Hifiman was designed with audiophiles in mind, so it comes with features such as user removable headphone amplifier circuitboard/module, a Burr-Brown PCM1704U digital-to-analog converter, and Burr-Brown OPA627 Op-Amp. Instead of a hard drive or flash memory, the player uses 32GB SDHC—meaning that capacity is only as limited as your tolerance for carrying around spare SD cards.

Many of us might not care about some of the finer details of the Hifiman, but what we should care about is this: It sounds amazing. According to CNET, this particular player is one of the very few which will actually take full advantage of everything your high-end headphones are capable of. [CNET]