Is it possible to find HAs with an app that allows you to selectively and incrementally tune out a high-frequency sound?
Here’s my problem: I have two situations in which background high-frequency mechanical sounds drive me nuts. One is my home office, which is above a basement boiler. Sometimes the pump whines in a consistent high-pitch background hum. The pump has been adjusted, but it’s still a problem in some situations. The other is a boat, where the autopilot at the helm does the same thing in some sea conditions.
I would love to have an app that would let me adjust to soften or mask those sounds. I’m currently a reasonably happy Oticon OPN1 user, thinking about moving to Oticon Real in the next few months. Was previously on Phonaks.
Two thoughts come to mind: 1)What kind of hearing loss do you have at that frequency? If you have good hearing at that frequency, I doubt there’s much that can be done, especially if one wears open domes. 2)I doubt you’re going to find that specificity in an app. With the programming software and programming device, one can reduce the gain at a certain frequency. That’s not the same as eliminating the noise though.
Like @mdb pointed out the gains can be lowered at the offending frequencies.
You could use a spectrum analyzer app on your phone to I.D.those frequencies,and have your audi create a custom program to accomplish this.
So, when you’re in your office, or or on the boat you can switch to that program, and Bob is your uncle!
Edit: your Oticons have 4 program slots, the 1st is your General Program, and the remaining 3 can be customized.
Confirming Oticon OPN has 4 slots for different programs. As previously suggested, make one program “Comfort” for when you experience these annoying sounds. Perhaps you can record the pump whine and play for your Audiologist to help define where the software adjustments need to be made to dull that whine.
Also the More and Real each have Sound Booster in the On App that you can enable. It doesn’t boost the sound, but rather slightly decreases the constant sound of a fan, motor, computer hum, etc. This might also help you. It only works in a General Program. So you could have 2 General Programs - the second General Program customized for quietening the whine sounds. Getting ahead here - just something for you to think about if you are considering the Real.
Wow–thank you, everyone, for your helpful and quick responses!
I have severe-profound “cookie bite” loss and wear custom molds. I actually hear some high frequencies better than many ‘normal’ people. Thinking about gain could be useful, if there’s a way of playing with that in an app.
Flash: you mentioned a ‘spectrum analyzer app’; I’ve never heard of such of thing and wonder if you can recommend one that I should look at.
Mago: The Sound Booster programming sounds like a possibility, if I can I isolate the sounds enough for my audi (big if). I guess the name is counterintuitive, as you suggest. I tried my speech-in-noise program on my OPNs (which don’t have Speech Booster) while I was on the boat, which I think is only programmed for a moderate adjustment anyway. In any case, it didn’t help.
But you’ve given me some things to try out and I’m grateful! Please let me know if you have any other ideas. I’m envisioning a future, where we can all make this sort of small adjustment with sliders on our phones…Someday…
Please consider posting up your audiogram. It’d help the discussion tremendously. I know you vaguely described your loss as some kind of severe to profound cookie bite loss, yet you can hear some high frequencies better than normal hearing people. This is quite bizarre because you combined severe-profound with better hearing than normal people, so an audiogram is almost a must to understand exactly what kind of hearing loss this looks like.
Usually without an audiogram and a vague description only, any kind of discussion is kinda like throwing mud on the wall. Many ensuing suggestions may not be appropriate for your kind of hearing loss at all if it’s not clearly known.
Thanks for posting your audiogram, @seaduck. I can see that in the high frequencies starting at 3 KHz, you have a mild loss on your right ear, and a moderate loss on your left year.
I think @flashb1024 's suggestion to download a free audio spectrum analyzer for your phone (for example Sonic Tools free app for the iPhone) may be able to help you identify the offending frequency range so that you can go have your audi cut down the gain on those specific frequencies only. Without knowing exactly where the offending frequencies are, it’d be a lot of trial and error and you don’t want to cut down the gain in the wrong places anyway.
Below is a screenshot of the Sonic Tools SVM app. If it’s really a case where the machine peaks out/stands out at a specific high frequency range compared to the rest of the sound spectrum, you will see its peak in the live graph, then you’ll know where to cut the gain. It goes without saying that you’ll have to be at the location where the offending noise is to use the spectrum analyzer.
However, if you don’t really see any stand-out peak at the high frequency range that you suspect, it may be a resonant frequency issue where a certain frequency range can cause resonance in combination with your hearing and ear canal shape that gets magnified specifically to you only, and this will not show as a peak on the spectrum analyzer. In this case, you’ll have to have your audi play trial and error to find out where it is and it’ll take a lot more time. It’d be easier to do trial and error experimentation if you can DIY your own hearing aids, because you can probably find the culprit frequency in maybe an hour, as opposed to endless appointments with your HCP, if they’re even agreeable to do it multiple times with you.
Using the Sound Booster would help only if the sound is localized and you’re not facing it. But if it permeates all around you then you’ll still hear it from the front, albeit maybe still helpful because you’ll hear less of it.
Thank you SO much for your detailed reply. I’ve just downloaded Sonic Tools SVM. It looks a bit technical for me, and I haven’t found a user guide yet, but I’ll play with it. And I have a friend who used to do some sound engineering who might be able to help.
A quick and probably dumb question: In the case of the basement boiler pump, I can go right to the unit to try to measure the frequency where it is loudest. Am I right that the frequency would be the same upstairs in my home office?
As for your comment about the possibility that the issues might be specific to me: My husband also hears these sounds, tho’ I’m guessing perhaps not as loudly as I do.
And from your description, I’m guessing Sound Booster might help to mitigate the problem enough that these sounds won’t be quite so annoying.
Maybe come at the basement boiler pump problem the same way folks with normal hearing would. That is, work with the pump rather than your aids. Can you turn it off, or surround it or the walls with baffles to muffle the sound? etc.
OR, normal hearing folks would wear ear plugs.
It is interesting that HAs allow us to manage–curate–sound coming in from the world in ways that normal hearing folks can’t do. Is this a good thing? something to think about.
Jeffrey – you make a point that I always try to emphasize when I talk to someone who’s feeling depressed because they’ve just been told they should get HAs. I say, but you’ll have bionic ears! We do have lots of advantages, and I suspect will have more with improving technologies (speech in loud restaurants, for example).
We’ve played with the boiler pump as much as we can. There’s apparently no way to isolate it, and the space is too big and messy (beams, utility lines, etc) to be able to baffle or sound proof it.
It doesn’t hurt to try with the Sound Booster because it’s already readily available in the Oticon ON app and all you have to do is enable it when you’re in your basement to see if it helps, as long as you don’t face the boiler pump. There’s nothing to set up.
While you’re near the boiler pump, just run the Sonic Tools SVM app and look for obvious stand-out peaks in the 3 KHz range and up (where you hearing is not as bad as the rest of the frequency range). In the example of the screenshot below where the Sonic ToolS SVM is showing the sound spectrum in red, you can see that this snapshot is showing an isolated peak at 2 KHz. That would be a stand-out peak that has a fairly large volume, as large as the peak at 100 Hz. By the way, your hearing aids don’t amplify above 8 KHz so ignore any peak you may find above it. So let’s say if this were your boiler pump noise (of course it’s not, just hypothetically speaking here), what’s bothering you may be this 2 KHz peak, so you can have your HCP dial down the gain at and around 2 KHz to see if it helps. Make sure to only do it in a separate program and not the default P1 program, so you can select it ONLY IF/WHEN you need to use it to mask out the offending pitch.
Having said all this, you can only turn down the gain in the hearing aids down to zero, you can’t make it less than zero. So for example, let’s say the graph shows that the offending pitch is at 8 KHz. Well, your hearing loss is only mild (on the right) to moderate (on the left) at 8 KHz, so the hearing aids are not really amplifying much at 8 KHz anyway in the first place. So even if you dial down the gain (very low gain to begin with) at 8 KHz down to 0, it probably still wouldn’t help, because you’re hearing it the normal way through the air, and very little of it comes from the hearing aids anyway.
This is assuming that you’re wearing some kind of open dome that has vents in it to let the normal sound through. If you wear a closed vent dome or closed vent mold that wouldn’t allow the sound to travel to your ear naturally through the air, then maybe you’ll have a better chance of using the aids to tune out the offending pitch because the closed dome gives the aids 100% control of how to deliver the sounds to your ears.
But then again, with only mild to moderate loss at the high frequencies, the aids already don’t amplify much in that range for you anyway. So even if you turn the amplification down to zero (it’s not actually zero sound per se, but it’d just give you no extra amplification, but you still get unity gain so you can hear the sound at the same level), it may not be as helpful.
But if the offending frequency(ies) is in the area of 1 to 2 KHz where your loss is more heavy, then dialing down the gain can be more effective than if the offending frequency(ies) is in the area of 3 KHz and above where your hearing loss is only mild to moderate.
Having said all that, in the Fine Tuning section, you can control how the amplification is set for soft level sounds, medium level sounds, and loud level sounds, all independently. There’s also a Max Power Output (MPO) setting. So the areas your HCP may want to adjust is the clamp down on zero gain for loud level sounds, and also reduce the MPO setting (to limit what the max output is) for the offending frequency(ies). Again, it may or may not be of much help because your loss isn’t that bad so the gain is already weak in the high range. So set your expectation accordingly.
This is very helpful. I’ll give it a shot with the boiler – the only problem is that our weather suddenly turned very warm, so no need for the boiler to kick in! I’ll pick my moment.
As for Sound Booster, I assume it’s not available to me with my current Oticon OPN1s and Oticon On app. I don’t see it on the app.
Re the domes: I wear custom molds, so maybe I’ll be able to have a bit more control, especially once I migrate (presumably) to Oticon Reals.
Oops, I forgot this fact. You can have your HCP set up a program that’s similar to the Sound Booster feature in the ON app. Just use the Speech in Noise built-in program, set the Noise Suppression values to max, and the Directionality Setting to Full Directional. The Full Directional value will aggressively attenuate sounds from the sides and behind you to let you focus more on sounds from the front.
