Quote:
Originally Posted by mcmars
I would like to know more about the causes for these rare conditions, time for google search.
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Thanks for the info on the guitar, good to hear.
The following is all hearing related, no gear talk in the rest of this reply.
I sure am glad yours cleared up. That is the case for the majority of people. The brain usually rewires after a certain point of time to ignore the tinnitus. I know exactly what you're talking about when you mention feedback and so forth. I've always had sensitive hearing and I would hear feedback before anyone else seemed to. When I was a sound man I could catch it before it really got nasty. Meanwhile the other guys would let it get nasty and stay there for a few seconds before they even moved for a slider. Drove me crazy but now I understand more so why I was that way and other people were not.
Hearing is so complex and so awe striking. I have been completely shocked as I studied it more and more in-depth, to all the functioning of the ear.
There's the things most of us know like, thousands and thousands of hairs that converts sound and then reassembles it in our heads to create the original sound, all at the speed of sound. That is shocking that all that actually exists in such a small part.
To my understanding this is where tinnitus happens. A hair gets broken from a sound wave that is too big and one of two things happens; it never functions again or it stays stuck in the "on" position. Although there are certain aspects of this that I do not understand. some people have gone to extreme solutions like cutting off their ear only to find the frequencies increase instead of decrease. So I decided I would keep my ears.
What I didn't know until these problems started for me was that the ear also has natural compression. When I say compression I quite literally mean the effect that we use to put a ceiling on how loud something can get. So a normal ear will compress signals to a point. Of course, when the decibels get too high, there's no protecting anybody. My ears have lost the ability for compression on certain frequencies. These frequencies spike for me very fast. While most people are conversing over a dinner meal, I am in outright pain at the sounds of cutlery on plates.
Perhaps even more amazing is, your ability to be balanced and to know where you are positioned in an environment is because of the semicircular canals in your ears. You have 3 of them in each ear for your X, Y and Z axis. Just picture yourself holding a Rubik's cube and the 3 different directions you can rotate sections to understand what I mean by the 3 axis. That is why people who have ear infections can have horrible vertigo and balance issues. External pressure is placed on the canals but they don't know that, so they send a false signal to the brain that you are spinning in circles when in fact you're sitting still. The semicircular canals are literally piping. I had a hereditary predisposition to damage there as sections were thin. I have a hole in one. When certain sounds are loud enough I completely lose all balance. I reach out, grab things quickly and hold on. Often times it overwhelms my system enough that I lose my vision for a few seconds. I'm certain I'm still able to see, but my system just won't relay sight to me. It's quite literally like I'm "offline" for a few seconds.
I'm guessing that sounds pretty horrible, but within it is the absolute marvel of just one part of our body. It's absolutely shocking to me that this exists within us and that it's so old. We only came up with the ability to create such tech ourselves in the past century. Yet this has existed in animals and humans for thousands and thousands of years.
The take-away?? Protect what you have! Once it's gone you may never get it back. Isn't it ironic that for the sake of musical enjoyment, we risk the ability of hearing ever again due to excessive volume. The odd time that I go to a concert now I wear earplugs! I still hear everything just fine at 30db less!