If the size could shrink to the size of a small earplug, I'd love to use this as a person who is not hearing-impaired (at least they couldn't diagnose me with it, so now I'm not sure if their diagnostics sucks, or I'm just a normal person and others pretend better that they hear everything well).
In groups and with friends, it's inevitable that you end up in a busy restaurant or a bar, and it always frustrates me that I don't hear something, I ask the person to repeat only to not hear it again, usually because they repeat it at the same low level (considering the circumstances). Missing jokes and throwaway comments is even worse ("hey what are you all laughing about, I didn't hear it, could you repeat it for me like three times until I hear it").
I could not hear anyone in any crowded situation. At middle age I thought my hearing was leaving. Yet every audiologist I went to said my hearing was fine. So I found the best audiologist in my fairly large metro area, and scheduled a year in advance (the wait list was that long).
After a whole day of tests the audiologist comes in and says I have good news and bad news and good bad news. The good news is that my hearing was beyond great, it was at the level of a 5 year old. The bad news: I could hear so well I was unable to differentiate sound; my hearing hadn’t gotten worse, my brain’s ability to separate sound had. The good bad news is that my hearing would inevitably deteriorate, as all ours does, and for several years I’d be able hear in public places!
I think part of what has made this worse is that restaurant and public space designers have stopped thinking about sound. Most bars opened in the last 15 years have cement floors, very little sound insulation, and they’re based on the idea that you’re not having a good time unless your ears are ringing.
I’ve stopped patronizing these places if only because I literally cannot maintain conversations.
Recently listened to a really good podcast about this phenomenon https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gastropod/id918896288?... (or pick your favorite podcast app)
Couple takeaways I remember:
- "Silence is the new luxury" -- restaurants can have good sound design, but it doesn't come cheap. Upscale restaurants are starting to differentiate themselves with sound design
- The modern clean aesthetic (glass, concrete, stainless steel, minimalism) promotes loud, echo'ey spaces
- "You're not having a good time unless your ears are ringing" was an intentional design choice popularized by some restaurant guru in the 90's. Growing awareness of the problems is starting to create a backlash
- Loud restaurants are damaging for the waitstaff's health. You can work for hours in an environment so loud that OSHA would demand hearing protection.
- The luxury sound design studios can be so good at isolating ambient noise that they also sell an "anti-noise-cancelling" sound system that actually selectively re-amplifies crowd noise for when you do want to tune up some sense of busy-ness (with too much sound dampening in an unfilled room, it starts to feel too isolated... being "out and about" is some of the reason people go out dining)
Aren't there some cheap ways to muffle sound?
Wood floors, rugs, curtains, artwork, acoustic panels, etc.
yes, really any soft surfaces will damp[0] (not "dampen") sound, but the techniques and materials can get very advanced (and expensive, and effective)
0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping
Why can't "dampen" be applied to oscillators? It means "To lessen; to dull; to make less intense" in this case.
i think the point is that it's one of those words misused so widely that dictionaries updated the definition to include the incorrect use.
dampen means to make something wet, or at least originally that's what it meant
According to https://www.etymonline.com/word/dampen it's meant "to dull or deaden, make weak" from 1630s and "to moisten, make humid" from 1827.
Whoa! Thanks for the clarification. As a word aficionado, I did not realize the correct form of this one.
as a fellow pedant, i also really appreciated this clarification. i love it when i learn i've been saying something wrong!
Stuff that works well in homes often is a lot more complicated to implement in restaurants, where you're: a) constantly fighting grease buildup and hard-to-remove dust that clings to greasy or damp surfaces, b) often have a profit margin of like 2% if you're one of the successful ones, c) aside from looking clean, you have to worry about pest control, fire codes, health codes (you can't have built-up dust falling in people's food, d) etc etc etc etc. Also, how restaurants look is as, or in some cases more important than the quality of the food. A good, attractive, practical restaurant design is one of the things that can steer you towards success or failure. Much to many chefs chagrin, hip and attractive restaurants with shitty boring food are often more profitable than ones that only focus on the food. Marketing is annoyingly important.
With, floors hardwood is a hard surface (so only mildly sound damping) so they're not too bad for cleaning and health stuff, but are expensive to install and take a lot to maintain if the worn-in look doesn't fit the aesthetic. Low-pile carpets can be shampood inexpensively for medium-term maintenance and replaced comparatively cheaply in the long run, but take a lot more effort to keep clean when someone drops a catering tray full of crème caramel and something with a port wine reduction.
Artwork: anything that you'd want hanging on your walls is either going to need to be a print or covered with glass or plastic because it will get ruined otherwise.
Acoustic panels are usually pretty ugly, difficult to clean, not resistant to pests, are a fire liability if coated in grease, etc.
Curtains definitely are definitely viable, but if you've got enough of them to really impact the sound level, they probably need to be expensive ones, and expensive curtains can't just be tossed in the wash and pressed on an ironing board.
It's not like they aren't effective, they're just not nearly as easy to deploy or maintain as they are in homes or offices.
Unrelated blathering because a lot of folks in tech don't have much exposure to this stuff and I always enjoy seeing a slice of someone else's life: In general a lot of people are understandably perplexed by seemingly simple, avoidable problems that they encounter in restaurants-- you can chalk almost all of them up to misinformation, or deliberately obfuscated factors. Firstly, there's a ton of inaccurate folk knowledge about the way restaurants work... (most infuriatingly to me is the food safety stuff. Look up the incubation time for most foodborne illnesses and consider how many people blame some lower GI symptoms the meal that met their stomach lining 3 hours earlier.) Also, a big part of the restaurant mystique is making it all seem sort of easy, uncomplicated, and fun, even for regulars and the 'friends and family' crowd; underneath that thin veneer, it's absolute insanity. I've worked in tech and the restaurant business extensively. Most days, the pressure level is "we just discovered a possible active intruder in our production systems" for at least a few hours. It's exhausting, and one of the reasons drug and alcohol addiction is so prevalent. Knowing that an entire staff is breaking their back so you can have a fun cozy bite to eat makes the experience palpably worse, but it's true. That's why you'll usually find people who've worked in the service industry are serious over-tippers. You have to give up a lot of your humanity to do that work, and a lot of people you encounter respect you less instead of more for having made that sacrifice.
I've proudly convinced so many people to not go into that business, though I've also convinced a few people to give it a shot. It's not a good choice for most people, but some people can't really do much else and be happy. In many ways, its especially tolerant to neurodivergent folks with different skillsets being downright useful in different roles. It's hard as hell though. There's a good reason that CIA (the school, not the spies) requires 6 months of full-time back-of-the-house restaurant work to get admitted to their degree program.
Sound dampening artwork actually seems really interesting.
Honestly the cheapest way to muffle sound is to not create it in the first place. Guests make noise to hear themselves over other guests and the din of the room, the quieter the room, the quieter the guests, etc.
Essentially, the louder the noise floor, the louder the signal has to get to be intelligible at every table, which raises the noise floor, creating a feedback loop. Good acoustic design in a space accounts for this by minimizing how much acoustic energy is present in the room - both by removing it (with acoustic treatment), spreading it away from sources (by isolating tables/booths, using hard surfaces to reflect sound away, etc), and preventing it from being created in the first place. For example, keeping bus stations behind galley doors and training staff not to clink silverware/glasses/dishes when filling bus bins and avoid playing loud music, etc.
In my experience, most restaurants fail at this because all the people who do it well are in the high-end restaurant business, which most restaurants are not. If the key to a space that isn't too loud is to limit the number of patrons, have dining room space allocated to treatment between tables, have highly trained staff with consistent management, and a big enough kitchen space with heavy enough doors to isolate the sound within - your only option is to be a high end restaurant.
But the high end places fail at it because they don't care and want to maximize the guest throughput because their margins still suck.
There definitely are but, perhaps by definition, items soft enough to dampen sound are often easily damaged so they aren’t great fits for most commercial locations.
They are also out of vogue as was mentioned, unless you’re a coffee shop then these “cozy” items just aren’t as common right now.
If you’re near Berkeley, CA, one of the owners of the restaurant Comal also owns a sound company that builds that kind of system, and they use Comal as a showplace. The effect is astounding - it’s an industrial-style design, and it’s got auditory “ambiance”, but you can have a full conversation at normal speaking volumes with everyone at the table. It’s the kind of thing where once you experience it, you’ll judge the hell out of any other “fancy” restaurant you go to that doesn’t have it.
Comal is one of the subjects of that podcast episode
Oh neat: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-08/restaurant...
Meyer Sound which did the sound install for the space is a long-time well-known innovator in sound tech- for example, establishing vertical line arrays. Years ago the son of the founder was doing advanced space modelling for the best sound (basically, entering the room geometry and simulating with helmholtz equations).
I will go there just for the experience.
Been to Comal a few times, need to go again and pay closer attention
Carpet the ceiling and the walls. Super cheap, super effective.
Ideally carpet the floor too - and if you use carpet tiles then when a customer spills something uncleanable on a tile it's a 5 minute non-expert job to pull up a tile and put in a new one.
Super dangerous and illegal, too.
The reason that professionals don't do this is because no one will permit it, not because there's some scam on acoustic foam and diffusers... well there is but it's not the acousticians' fault. It's a massive fire hazard.
You mean we haven't figured out a material that both dampens sound and is fire resistant?
Being as how the former quality is pretty easy, I find this hard to believe.
source? Seems like with this logic, wood, wallpapers etc. would be illegal as well. Doesn't make sense to me
I resorted to wearing earplugs for several years when I was going out more. I felt it did very little to reduce my ability to hear conversations, and it made the whole experience overall so much more pleasant.
If the SNR is already low enough that you're having issues discerning speech, lowering the volume won't help.
Lowering the volume can help with the SNR, because neither the signal, the noise, nor the lowering effect caused by earplugs are consistent with respect to frequency. Highly objectionable, harsh 4-8 kHz noise that might echo around a concrete and steel venue is blocked well by good earplugs, while low-frequency 100-400 Hz speech is ineffectively blocked.
Do you have a good earplug recommendation?
I like these best for low cost plugs. Howard Leight LL-1 Laser LiteUncorded Foam Earplugs Box, 200 Pair https://a.co/d/3REDT7l
Ha! I bought the same box literally a month ago, this listing ships Prime and costs a little less: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0007XJOLG
Those are great for the workshop, but they're flourescent green and pink. That makes it easy to see when someone's wearing them, which is good in a shop but usually bad in social settings.
I have some of these https://www.loopearplugs.com/
They're super comfortable and they don't look weird like the neon yellow foam ones :) Before I always disliked wearing earplugs when I have to at concerts, but the ones from Loop I just wear anywhere I like that is too loud
I go to live music a lot so I invested in some custom molded earplugs from 1of1custom.com
I like Etymotic (https://www.etymotic.com). The design lowers the decibels without affecting the sound too much. I used to play in a band with a drummer who always wore their high-end plugs which you have to have molded to your ear canals, but they also make cheaper standardized ones that do a good job.
Loops are great as a sibling comment mentioned but I had to have very loud dehumidifiers in my house all weekend; I've been walking around with my Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 3s in transparency mode (i.e. uses microphones to play sound from the outside into the headphone), and it's been amazing. It cut the audio to a maximum level and let me discern conversations more easily than folks not wearing anything.
It won't help you discern speech, but it'll stop your ears ringing.
Except it absolutely will help you discern speech. The sound blocking is not uniform across all frequencies and most speech is not blocked very well. So earplugs will make speech 20% quieter but will also make all the nonsense going on around you 70% quieter. So the speech will be easier to hear assuming you don't have $3 Wish earplugs.
It didn't help much with the signal, but it also didn't make it worse, and it made the overall experience far more pleasant.
Ha. Classic techie parachuting in and incorrectly intuiting how something works. Show me earplugs that REDUCE equally across all frequencies and I’ll invest every dollar I have to my name.
That's not entirely true, if you're selectively lowering the volume of different frequencies it might solve the problem. The only problem with that is that earplugs tend to reduce high frequencies more than low frequencies, but background noise is mostly low frequencies. Earplugs might help you hear people in a machine shop with a lot of high frequency noises though.
I've done this too and it helps tremendously.
I've got a similar thing; I can't pull most song lyrics out of the song, and any significant amount of background noise means lip reading for me. Hearing's all fine, it's the processing that doesn't work quite right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
Ditto here. An audiologist recommended something called LACE therapy, but it wasn't cheap so at the time I didn't go for it - I need to look into it, and see if it's a legitimate treatment for this, or snake-oil.
I would not say it's snake oil, but it will only help if you've learned some helplessness or are bad at thinking about what someone is saying while they are speaking. A hearing aid or filter is always going to be more helpful if you only can pick one treatment.
But that's the thing, I'm in the similar position to others in the chain - last week, an audiologist said my hearing was tremendously good. But if there's noise around me, I cannot process what people are saying.
I'm not sure what you mean by "only if you've learned some helplessness." I'm not a complete idiot, I can generally guess what someone is saying based on context, but if I'm having a conversation with Group A in a loud environment, and someone from group B turns to me and says something, I don't have much context as to what they're saying.
(Also, a PSA: if someone who didn't hear you says, "what", or "can you say that again?", don't just repeat the last three words you said. Please repeat the entire sentence. I know that usually, the last few words provide enough context to reconstruct the sentence, but if you just tell me "this Sunday?" it's usually not enough, you have to just say, "Are you still planning on reconfiguring the encambulator this Sunday?")
My pet peeve about asking people to repeat isn't that they won't repeat enough, but that they'll repeat in exact the same volume and enunciation as they originally spoke. I'm not sure why they expect to do the same thing again and get different results. The only thing that I've found that works is to tell them what it sounds like they said, no matter how crazy ("Did you say, 'the elephant is painting the room'?") and only then will they speak loud and clear. (Which I'm sure is annoying for the other person, but what else am I to do?)
The parent poster’s word choice was perhaps uncharitable, but my read is helplessness is not equitable to idiocy. To me, it’s more the difference between actively trying to understand the conversation vs letting it tune out as a default.
I find that I have trouble focusing on one conversation if others are happening around me, but that has much to do with where my focus lies as my brain being overwhelmed.
Interesting. I suspect I may have the same thing.
I also have poor vision without glasses, and I’ve always found that when I go swimming (and can’t wear my glasses) my hearing also gets significantly worse. Or at least the cocktail party problem gets worse, as my brain seems to get overwhelmed by every single background noise. I think some of this is explained by many indoor pools being big echoey spaces, but it still happens at outdoor pools as well. I suspect that when one sense (sight) is degraded, my brain tries to compensate by focusing on another sense (hearing), and the end result is even worse due to APD.
This is why I turn on closed captioning even when I'm watching alone with headphones on.
Not to act like an arm-chair doctor but have you ever considered that you may be on the ASD spectrum?
That function of being able to mentally 'filter out' specific voices within a crowd is (semi?) common signal of autism. More accurately; I'm like that and I am autistic, I've read that it happens to a lot of others.
It can also happen with ADHD. I seem to have difficulty integrating sensory information and thinking at the same time. If it’s noisy, it causes a series of buffer overflows at every level of cognition.
Yep, I have ADHD and have always needed to put more effort toward parsing a particular sound in a dense sound field than other people. I've also always had trouble quickly identifying a particular object in a dense visual field. My wife jokes I'm "the world's worst 'Where's Waldo' player".
I can still manage to do these things but it takes longer, requires more effort and I'm generally never as good at it as others seem to be. I've always suspected these two things are related to each other and to my ADHD. There's a related audio issue I suspect is also tied to ADHD. When I'm mentally focused on a task, if someone interrupts me, I often miss the first couple words they say. Fortunately, when it happens I can usually derive the missing context from the rest of the content. Interestingly, it's not that I didn't hear the sound of the words, it feels more like a lag in mental context switching to parse the sounds into meaning.
I never considered ADHD affecting my visual processing but it very well could be.
Happens to me all the time, I'm listening but sometimes my brain blips. I hear the words, but I no longer remember them by the time I'm trying to understand them.
I'm recently diagnosed, and I'm this way with auditory and visual input. If I go to a crowded sports bar with TVs, I'm basically useless.
Theory: The bars and restaurants want young patrons, so the poor acoustics are a selection mechanism. Only young people can converse there, so older folks stay away. The place gets reputation as “young and hip.”
Whether by conscious design or “natural selection” for establishments, this seems to be the case.
Designers for bars and clubs will take the clientele into account in subtle sensory ways. One once told me how he designed a club known to cater to those having trysts-- it had many isolated booths where the lighting prevented seeing into the booths from the main areas.
the club was already known for that before it was designed?
There’s something called Auditory Processing Disorder where you are not able to able to differentiate sound and it supposedly can develop later in life.
I’ve had it since I was a kid because I always passed the hearing tests but every other kid had no trouble listening to music and understanding the words and so on so I put two and two together.
Anyway, I have never been able to understand anyone in any loud public space which absolutely blows when you’re not a home body.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
Thank you for the name of this disorder and link! I've also had this my whole life, and I knew it was a thing that wasn't terribly rare (based on reading comments from others in the past, here on HN and elsewhere), but I think this is the first time I've seen a name for this condition.
The Wikipedia page seems to really describe my condition, except for the potential overlap with ADHD. For example, the "difficulty following oral instructions". I can read something and retain it forever, but if someone speaks to me, it will often go in one ear and out the other.
I sometimes wonder if this could be a result of being a very introverted child who started reading at around 3 or 4 years old. (Because reading is so awesome, why bother listening to people -- and improving your auditory neurology -- after that?)
I think I've probably just adapted to the condition. It doesn't seem like any sort of problem or disability. But I suspect others around me find it much more annoying than I do. ;)
One thing I feel in my personal experience --
while I am doing something -- inability to switch attention to someone speaking to me if they do not first ask for my attention (excuse me / hello / myname / cough / knock) before diving into speaking in sentences.
very often by the time i start paying attention to them speaking -- they are 4-5 words into their sentence and I have missed the context of what they are talking about and i have to ask them to stop and repeat from start
This has happened with me in multiple settings (work and personal life)
Not sure if this is a common thing along with APD - which i recognize some symptoms of in myself
I don’t go to bars very often anymore but I absolutely detest live music. I go with friends to talk. Not to have loud music prevent a conversation.
Ironically, I think most of my hearing loss is from people trying to talk to me while I was listening to a band.
If the band is playing zip it!
Dunno whether you really need more than your hands to communicate when listening to a band in that situation. At least until you get to more than 10 people that need a beer.
I'm one of those annoying ADHD people who will hear everything you're saying, ask "What?," and then a second later I've finished processing the audio in my head and am ready to continue the conversation. Similarly, I can't readily differentiate voices from melody in songs. Far too many songs don't have strong enough vocal tracks and the songs might as well just be mud to me. I suppose it's why I gravitated towards rap and R&B growing up.
You know, until you mentioned it, I'd never thought that that experience might have an ADHD-related component to it. Interesting.
There are some restaurants we don't often go to because they are too loud to be enjoyable. Luckily its patio weather most of the year here in California so eating outside is generally much quieter and enjoyable.
I also have trouble discerning sounds in crowded spaces. Thanks for sharing your diagnosis, really interesting to think about.
The one thing that annoys me about restaurants and other crowded places... is the insistence on playing music to attempt(?) to cover the sound!
I simply don't understand it, why the hell would I want a noisy place where I can barely hear anyone to have MORE noise!? it's not even good quality noise, it's usually top 40 from 10 years ago being blasted over shit speakers.
Have you tried earplugs like Loop or Eargasm? I’ve considered them for a while, but never pulled the trigger. Reddit seemed to prefer Loops to Eargasms.
I actually find foam earplugs make voices easier to hear. I can have conversations during concerts with them somehow, in fact. So I figure if foam earplugs can do that for me, then earplugs designed to block only unwanted noise are probably even better.
Case in point, I was recently at a Swans concert—-they play very long sets, like 3 hours—-and my back got tight, so I started stretching. I heard someone 20 ft away talking shit! They said, “yeah, I guess you can do your Pilates here.” I finished the stretch and then heard, “oh, I guess he was just stretching.”
My hearing aids have a custom directional hearing section I can modify. I’ll give this a try next time I’m in a crowded area.
I patronize them - from a distance.
Auditory processing disorder?
This isn't your issue though. A group chooses to talk in an environment where they can barely hear each other. Rather than using a device for it, I'd recommend to perceive the problem as it is and solve it in a conventional way. E.g. by saying "I couldn't hear shit, and you too probably. That's stupid, let's go <goodplacename> instead" unless it's hard to do. Generally these places are designed for you to suffer unless you're screaming all the time and are indifferent to surroundings. I don't get why people go there and leave money, cause I wouldn't go there even for that money. You don't want an AI device that replaces respect for each others limits.
It's certainly their issue if they want to continue spending time with the group doing what most of the group prefers.
That's a problem with lack of empathy and understanding on your part, not with the group dynanimcs of that person's friends.
Group dynamics are hard, see Abilene paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
Always suspected this - didn't know there was an actual term for it. Thanks!
It's sort of inevitable in crowded situations. My main objection is when there's also loud music when that really isn't the purpose of the gathering.
You don't always have a choice. Sometimes there are loud places where you just have to be (airports, train stations, etc). My most frustrating time is transiting airports with my wife, who is a very quiet talker.
There are these passive directional earplugs https://www.flareaudio.com/pages/earhd
The prospect of an earplug that eases focusing audio got me interested... but no thanks, I won't go out to socialize with basically two mini trumpets coming out of my ears. It looks funny, reminiscing of classic b&w pictures with deaf people carrying ear trumpets everywhere with them during 18th century.
Yeah, I like the concept, not a fan of the implementation.
I was agreeing with you, but then I watched the video of Stephen Fry and I felt that they just looked like beats earbuds, which people have normalized wearing.
I responded to another comment but after reading this thread noticed my hearing aids have a custom directional hearing section I can modify.
This is one of those frustrating gaslighting things that is half true in that half the time I also pretend to hear what someone else is saying even though I couldn’t just because it’s not really important and making a big deal about it (ie asking them to repeat it at continuously louder decibels) can get awkward.
So I'm not alone. I'm in my mid-forties and have experienced a significant decline over the last few years. Now I can rarely distinguish one voice in moderate background noise (conversations, music) without leaning towards them, cupping my ears. Sometimes I just have to give up and try to nod or smile at the right time as the conversation goes on around me.
I recently had a test at an ENT doctor who told me my hearing is fine and insinuated I was wasting his time. The test was listening to high-pitched beeps over white noise, which isn't representative of the problem. Distinguishing one particular tone over several similar ones would be more like it.
Hey, there's dozens of us! :P
I wrote about my experience with this last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35897515
I did exactly the type of diagnosis you're talking about. It was quite good at how it simulated a noisy environment with a bunch of background chatter and then a single voice you were meant to listen to that would repeat various patterns of words with various combinations of lower speaking volume and/or higher background noise.
One thing I wish I'd made a point of at the time was the fact that, despite being an apparently soundproof booth with headphones on, I could definitely hear people talking in the waiting room and another audiologist in an adjacent room. Though I'm not sure it would have materially changed their lack of diagnosis (they'd already detected I could hear into negative decibels).
I still don't have a diagnosis, but I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that maybe it's not that my hearing is bad but that I actually hear too much. What I'd previously thought was my unability to hear people speaking on the radio in the car when everyone else clearly could wasn't because I couldn't hear the radio, it's that I can't hear it over the top of all the tyre and wind noise I'm also hearing and trying to process out. I don't think the other passengers in the car hear the rest of the noise, they only hear the radio.
I bought various types of Loop earplugs and have found them fantastic for live music events. I can now hear my friends when they're talking to me! Unfortunately they greatly amplify my perception of the volume of my own voice when I talk which has the undesirable side-effect of making me talk even quieter so I feel like I'm having to yell when I want to talk to people. I've also not found them as useful as I'd hoped in restaurant-type settings.
Same thing. Did a test and the audiologists comment was that I would be the best hearing tested all day or all month and come back in twenty years.
I've taken to wearing bone-conductors waaaaay to much, and I'm impressed with their flexibility for stuff like this. They keep my ears open, but when I need to hear the headset more clearly (like if I'm in a crowded area and taking a call) I can plug my ear with my finger and that both improves the audio quality of the bone conductor (it creates a speaker cabinet in your ear for a much fuller sound) and blocks out the outside noise. If you need full headphone-quality you put in ear-plugs. And they're pretty small and discrete.
They're not perfect, but the fact that I can move smoothly from "I need my ears open but still want to hear my headset" to "I need to block out sound and hear my headset perfectly clearly" with just a finger or a pair of earplugs is great.
Stick a shotgun mic (that's the term for a mic with tight directional cone, right? Not an audio guy) on the side and this would be really cool.
Shokz has these bone conductor headsets with mics.
I had Shokz bone-conducting headphones (openmove or something like that?), but unfortunately the battery died after a single charge. It was a shame 'cause I was really fond of them. If/when my headphones give the ghost I'll give them another shot.
I have issues with auditory processing disorder which means my hearing is actually really good, but someone talking to me seems to get a much lower decode priority than some random noise around me - if I can see the lips, even though I can't lipread, it helps me decode the speech with a much greater accuracy.
Every time I looked into this, it seemed to push the link with autism and/or adhd - back in 2008 I wasn't diagnosed so I poo-pooed the idea somewhat. Now I'm diagnosed as AuDHD.
I'm recently diagnosed and I experience the same. Listening to someone in a crowded room takes a ton of effort because my brain wants to track all of the other conversations and noises.
Yeah, same. My hearing is absolutely not great, but "good enough", but in noisy environments I struggle. Given I'm fairly introvert to start with, on one hand, I'm perfectly at ease just checking out and sitting with my own thoughts if I can't hear a conversation, but when I do decide to come out with someone I'd prefer it to be easier to be more social instead of resorting to checking out.
I’m in the same boat. My hearing has a dip around the 2-4khz range which makes speech unintelligible in many situations. Otherwise it seems normal and I still hear details in music that others can’t. Using Sony headphones in voice mode helps but I don’t carry them all day…
Tip for anyone trying to communicate in noisy room:
1. Don't speak fast. Speak slow. Enunciate and articulate all the consonants. And do it very slowly. Give the vowels lots of room to be noticed.
2. Don't speak lightly.
3. Don't mumble.
Aayyeee hHHaaaVVE TTOOO GOOO NNAAAoooUUU
As an older adult I've realised I most likely have ADHD - I've always struggled to focus in busy places, unless the person has my attention - as soon as we are in a group or people all talking or pitching in, and I can't focus on one face, I'm lost. My hearing is fine (I assume) - but I've come to realise I can't process information when there is too much going on.
My family will often have the TV on, games playing on phones, and talking too - I just can't hack it.
Equally the option to work from home has revolutionised my productivity - without having 10 things to filter out, I can just focus on getting the task in hand done. In an office I often get lost and distracted, and have to power through the noise.
I happened to go out with a group of workers from a deaf school. It was a particularly loud and annoying bar and it didn't bother them one bit. :-)
The article mentions "The team is working to expand the system to earbuds and hearing aids in the future."
People with some hearing loss can't hear consonants but vowels can be heard. I think that's why some people may assume they don't have a hearing problem.
My Mother has had poor hearing for decades. She listened to a radio as a kid she held it next to her ear at a loud volume. Now she often says she "can't stand noise" but it's because she can't hear in loud environments anymore due to hear hearing problems. I've noticed she misses the start of a sentences like if I said "I'm going to get some milk" she heard "got some milk" (as in I just got it). Or she interrupts people because she can't hear the first part of someone starting to speak most people tend to speak low at the start of a sentence.
That's so you can lean in and get a little bit more friendly. Or go out for some fresh air together.
My favorite case of this awkwardness:
Other person: *mumble mumble* SOMETHING CLEARLY SPOKEN
Me: I'm sorry, what?
Them: "clearly spoken?"
Me: No, the first part.
Them: "something?"
Me, giving up: *smiles and nods* Yeah!
(quietly hopes I didn't just agree that putting hamsters in blenders or something is a cool idea)