[Dprglist] Sample Retrieval vacuum cleaner

Sun Jan 20 23:58:17 PST 2019

Rud,
Now that I read your entire posting, I agree with you 100%. You fully understand the problems with hearing aids and what wearers have to do to learn how to use them. I agree that BTE aids are necessary. Regarding restaurants, the "cocktail party problem" is the hardest DSP problem I know of. There are no solutions, nor any viable theories of how to solve the problem, yet we solve the problem every day in our heads, if we have good hearing. There is no hearing aid solution to the cocktail party problem. I am working on a solution, but latency is a big problem. AES's HRTF standard will help, but even with zero latency, the HRTFs are only half of the solution.
I am interested in this because I will need hearing aids and I want them to work for me. I've worn aids for several days without medical necessity and I understand the problems aids create. I had an idea to shift voices to sound like Wolfman, shifting the spectrum down to the wearer's residual spectrum, but I see that has already been done. Must have been a good idea. But the directionality problem has not been addressed except for left-right and front-back emphasis, and the emphasis has been to eliminate sounds, whereas a listener actively ignores sounds that have NOT been eliminated. (That may be nonintuitive: The sounds we ignore are NOT eliminated from what we hear! We have to hear what we don't want to hear so that we know we don't want to hear it.) The psychoacoustics are not being used in the aids, and indeed our brain's psychoacoustics are being severely thwarted by the aids. I must correct this problem before I need hearing aids.

Robotic sound processing is one of the synergistic things related to my goal of having a hearing aid that works for me.
Thanks again for your reply. I hope to learn more from you.
John Swindle

-----Original Message-----
From: Rud Merriam via DPRGlist <dprglist at lists.dprg.org>
To: dprglist <dprglist at lists.dprg.org>
Cc: Rud Merriam <rudmerriam at gmail.com>
Sent: Sun, Jan 20, 2019 9:08 pm
Subject: Re: [Dprglist] Sample Retrieval vacuum cleaner

 I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 25 and am now 70. I have always been able to localize sound sources. Perhaps not as accurate as someone with normal hearing but well within the quadrant and likely to with 15-30 degrees.  With the current SOTA DSP I can probably hear tones better than someone with normal hearing if I tweak the settings. The challenge is speech comprehension in noisy situations. 
  I need the power of BTE aids. Current aids have two mics one facing forward and the other back. DSP uses them for noise canceling and probably for lessening the rear sounds to mimic normal hearing. Haven't looked into the details of the processing but am generally familiar with DSP.  
  On my soapbox for all: once you turn 50 get a hearing test and repeat it every 5 years. You won't notice the loss so you need a test to detect it. If you wait too long the brain loses the ability to 'hear' the sounds, especially for speech comprehension. If you get aids wear them even though they will annoy the heck out of you. That's because you're now hearing stuff, like the HVAC air movement through ducts, that you couldn't because of the loss. You're brain will relearn and sort it out if you do it soon enough. They won't work as well as possible at first because the hearing tech will set the gain below what you really need, probably 85% or so. After a few months you'll get comfortable with them and the tech can increase the gain to 100%. They can also tweak the DSP settings if you pay attention to when you're having difficulties. Restaurants are the absolute worst places because of all the noise. 
  I have never lost a hearing aid because I (1) always get shirts with breast pockets so if I have to take them out that's where they go and (2) at home there are only 2 or 3 places where I will put them down. We just got kittens so at home now only keep them in a box on my desk. Previously there was a spot in the kitchen, the bathroom vanity, and my desk. I do have small case I can take with me if I know I will be taking them out - like going someplace for swimming or exercise. It goes in my pants pocket but is not comfortable. </soapbox>

 -73 - 
 Rud Merriam K5RUD 
  Mystic Lake Software  

   On 1/20/19 1:05 PM, John Swindle via DPRGlist wrote:

People with hearing aids can't figure out who is talking to them because hearing aids are in, or on, their ears (behind-the-ear has a piece in the ear),  changing the ear canal that the wearer grew up with. The ones that aren't in-the-ear also mess up the pinna. Have you wondered how we can know sound is in front of us, behind us, or above us, when we only have two ears? It's the pinna and the ear canal. The pinna and the ear canal screw up the sound. They are not flat transducers of the sound. We learn how to hear as we grow up. We learn what the screwups sound like. If the pinna is cut off or interfered with, and the ear canal is plugged with an aid, the wearer loses all but left-right info about where sounds come from, until they re-learn how to hear. A few decades ago, head models were used for recordings and head response transfer functions were created. After 30 or so years, just a couple years ago, the Audio Engineering Society published a standard for measuring and using HRTFs. The only use I've seen for them so far is virtual reality games.
 _______________________________________________
DPRGlist mailing list
DPRGlist at lists.dprg.org
http://lists.dprg.org/listinfo.cgi/dprglist-dprg.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.dprg.org/pipermail/dprglist-dprg.org/attachments/20190121/876b4444/attachment.html>