Hearing ability and guitar tone?

[BoneDigger]

My hearing appears to be going down hill a bit. Does hearing loss result in only a reduction in loudness, or can it also affect the ability to detect tone/tune?

Todd

Sent from a cell phone. Sorry for any typos.

[rogthefrog]

It depends.

Some hearing loss is frequency-specific, e.g. you have a reduced ability to hear or distinguish above a certain frequency. Some is more general, and you lose "volume" across the board.

If you're experiencing hearing loss, it's best to see an audiologist and get diagnosed properly so you can remedy the right thing (same idea as getting the right eyeglass prescription).

[Wade Hampton]

No, hearing loss definitely can have an impact on the different frequencies you can hear. One example I can think of offhand was a local guy here in Anchorage, who's a good guy and a good singer. He also has some hearing loss and wears a hearing aid in one ear.

He's one of the few people I personally know who owns and uses a Martin D-45. The one he owns is a fine-sounding guitar, but he decided it needed "improvement," so he replaced the stock bridge pins with brass pins.

Which, to my ears, had a profound negative impact on that guitar's tone: it went from being rich and glorious-sounding to stiff and cheap-sounding. Those heavy brass bridge pins killed a LOT of the bass and midrange response. The guitar really sounds thin and tinny now, remarkably like an all-plywood Samick dreadnought I'd played a few days earlier.

Yet he couldn't be happier with the result. He loves the brass pins and thinks they really "made the guitar come alive." He asked me what I thought of them, and I gave him the honest answer that I preferred the sound of the guitar with the stock pins in it.

But he was so delighted with the brass pins that I knew it was pointless to say anything else, much less try to talk him into jettisoning them. To him the new brass bridge pins improved the sound, pure and simple. My guess is that by altering the guitar's sound, by hampering the low end and lower midrange by adding mass to the bridge, it clarified the treble response for him in a way that his damaged hearing could hear better.

So, yeah. I don't think there's any question that hearing loss affects not only how well you hear soft voices but also what frequencies register, and how accurately.

Hope that makes sense.


Wade Hampton Miller

[Gasworker]

I have frequency hearing loss from high pressure natural gas exposure. I wear 2 hearing aids. Without them, there are a lots of notes I simply can't hear and it used to confuse me to the point where my wife would ask me why I keep playing the same thing over and over. Now I put my hearing aids in and voila....there they are. Kinda sucks but my hearing has stabilized and technology is pretty good

[zmf]

Originally Posted by BoneDigger

My hearing appears to be going down hill a bit. Does hearing loss result in only a reduction in loudness, or can it also affect the ability to detect tone/tune?

Most hearing loss starts with higher frequencies. I'm not sure if my loss is that specific, but I have switched from mainly PB strings to 80/20s. Perhaps I'm attempting to amplify higher frequencies to compensate for this loss?

I don't know whether frequency discrimination is altered. Our speech perception/discrimination takes hit, and some of this may be due to central auditory processing -- inhibitory transmitters important in sharpening the tuning of auditory neurons tend to decrease in function -- which may, in turn, degrade our discrimination. Not clear if a loss in speech discrimination translates to frequency discrimination. I'd be curious to know the answer.

Personally, I don't think my frequency discrimination is worse -- in fact, I think it's improved with the training that attends playing guitar.

I sometimes wear hearing aids when attending meeting/seminars, but I refuse to wear them when playing guitar. Bad sound.

[BoneDigger]

I need to get checked by a professional. These 46 year old ears have been to too many shooting ranges without hearing protection.

Todd

Sent from a cell phone. Sorry for any typos.

[Alan Carruth]

Hearing loss varies a lot, and can be problematic in a number of ways. I suffered a fairly large hearing loss because of jet engine and machinery noise in the Navy, and that's on top of a genetic problem. Most noise induced loss does start with high frequencies and work it's way down, because of the way your ears are built. The type of loss that runs in my family is broad band, affecting all frequencies more or less equally. The Navy stuff gave me a ten or fifteen year head start on the sort of loss my brother and father experienced, with maybe an added fillip in the high treble. It's a drag.

Often enough frequencies in the upper octave of our hearing tend to be irritating. For a person with 'normal' acuity, with a cut off around 20,000 Hz, that means that tones above 10,000 Hz will tend to be unpleasant. As your upper cut off goes down in pitch you can well find that the highs become harder to take. I suspect that's the key to Wade's friend's love of brass bridge pins. The added mass cuts down the response of the guitar across the board, but primarily in the higher frequencies. It may also suppress certain things in the mid-range that Wade notices more than his friend does. Sometimes what the guitar 'sounds like' and what it actually does can be pretty different. It's one of the 'joys' of trying to figure this stuff out.

I've made several guitars with side ports over the years. Feedback from customers, and measurements I've made, suggest that one use of that feature may well be to improve the experience for folks with hearing loss. From what I can tell the port acts like a 'monitor', directing higher frequency sound toward the player, and it gets more effective as you go up in pitch. With a high-end loss that could be helpful.

[zmf]

Originally Posted by Alan Carruth

I've made several guitars with side ports over the years. Feedback from customers, and measurements I've made, suggest that one use of that feature may well be to improve the experience for folks with hearing loss. From what I can tell the port acts like a 'monitor', directing higher frequency sound toward the player, and it gets more effective as you go up in pitch. With a high-end loss that could be helpful.

Alan -- If sound ports direct higher frequencies towards the player, and higher frequencies become more annoying with hearing loss......? Wonder of that's why I don't like sound ports?

It's usually redheads that can hear as high as 20K. Most of us get to only around 14K. But if you're a pigeon, you can hear down to around 1Hz.

[Ted @ LA Guitar Sales]

Originally Posted by BoneDigger

My hearing appears to be going down hill a bit. Does hearing loss result in only a reduction in loudness, or can it also affect the ability to detect tone/tune?

Hearing loss is different for everyone. I recently had a test and found that although I do have some hearing loss, it's even across the tonal spectrum, which is certainly helpful in my line of work where I have to describe tonal qualities on a daily bases.

[kydave]

Originally Posted by BoneDigger

I need to get checked by a professional. These 46 year old ears have been to too many shooting ranges without hearing protection.
Todd
Sent from a cell phone. Sorry for any typos.

Funny, but I ALWAYS used hearing protection of some sort when shooting, even as a kid. But as a teen in the '60s it didn't occur to us to use hearing protection when playing those power chords on our electrics, standing in front of the amp cranking out the rock music to a hall full of dancing patrons...

My hearing loss is the typical "rockers' curve", with a bit off in the low end, minor loss across the mids, and a drop off in the highs.

We are lucky to have technology today which goes a long way to remedying the specific loss on an individual level.

Good luck and get that check up!

[zmf]

Originally Posted by BoneDigger

I need to get checked by a professional. These 46 year old ears have been to too many shooting ranges without hearing protection.

That professional is going to yell at you for not wearing ear protection.

I'm supposed to wear ear plugs when mowing the lawn. (yeah, right)

[BoneDigger]

Originally Posted by zmf

That professional is going to yell at you for not wearing ear protection.

I'm supposed to wear ear plugs when mowing the lawn. (yeah, right)

Oh yeah, definitely. I was young and stupid.

Todd

Sent from a cell phone. Sorry for any typos.

[gip111]

Unfortunately, there isn't anything one can do about hearing loss. I've been working with machinery all my life and exposed to high music levels eventually did me in. One of my ears has lost most of the high frequencies and my doctor recommended the use of ear plugs when at work to prevent further damage.
I also find myself using 80/20 strings more often.

[varve]

I'm an ear, nose and throat surgeon, and I have many, many musicians as patients. The answer to this great question carries a complexity common to any collision of reality and perception

Most hearing loss starts in the high frequencies and proceeds down the frequency spectrum with the march of time. That loss starts in our late teens, but we only test up to 8,000 Hz.

Pitch is largely our perception of fundamental frequency, so is mostly unaffected by high frequency hearing loss. However, it is the harmonic content of music that gives it color, texture and differentiates one source from another. This is greatly affected by hearing loss, thus the brass pin example, and a whole bunch of others

The great thing about musicians, however, is that musical experience seems to imbue a certain immunity to one of the worst aspects of hearing loss, the decline of word discrimination that occurs over time. The self perception of the musician's performance is often worse than the testing would siggest however. I see this all the time in clinic. Musician's will do quite well with their hearing loss, both in terms of musical ability and communication, but they will think they are doing so much worse because they started with highly skilled ears to begin with. It's kind of like an aging athlete no longer able to compete on a professional level, but beating the pants off mere mortal humans in a pick up game.

Cheers, Dave Olson (MD)

[rogthefrog]

Dave: thanks for the reply. Are cochlear implants only an option for profoundly deaf people, or can they be used to combat less acute hearing loss?