How important is your hearing?

[kerry davies]

Just a reminder of something we have debated extensively on BR, noise reduction and hearing protection.

The wife of the Inspiral Carpets drummer Craig Gill has said there needs to be a greater awareness of the devastating effects of tinnitus after an inquest into his death returned an open verdict.

 

Rose Marie Gill issued a statement about the condition after an inquest into her husband’s death heard how the only concern he had in his life was the tinnitus he had had for more than 20 years.

 

Gill said: “For the past 20 years, Craig suffered from debilitating tinnitus, a condition caused by not protecting his hearing when enjoying the careers he loved the most – a successful musician, DJ and love of listening to music.

 

“His condition affected his day-to-day wellbeing and he suffered in silence with both sleep deprivation and anxiety.”

[paulears]

Interesting that when cold called by the people who ask if you have a hearing problem caused by your work, and you say yes - they can't help if you say you worked with loud music? Foundry workers, pneumatic drillers fine - drums, no!

[cedd]

I saw the impact the diagnosis of hearing loss had on my dad (a musical director and musician of some 50+ years). When it's your livelihood, hobby and passion your hearing is everything. He had some sad times accepting it.

In the end he bought some incredibly posh hearing aids privately with bluetooth remote control to change filter settings. His audiologist (a nationally recognised and award winning one at that) was interested in his story and spent a lot of time working with him, playing him music and helping him to get his filters set up exactly right. Now he has a conducting & playing preset which removes EQ, compression and some of the directivity functions so that what he hears is as near to flat as it can be. When he's driving he has a preset that turns down his right ear and puts in specific EQ in that ear because he likes to drive with the window open a touch. When he's speaking to you he has a different preset as well. It's all very clever!

 

 

In short, his hearing loss didn't have to be the end of his work or love of music making. Yes it cost him a lot of money, yes it's not the same as his original hearing, but with the right help he managed to find a way.

I can't speak for tinnitus that keeps you awake - he never had it to that extent, it was just loss. I can imagine though what effect the sleep deprivation would have. There is work being done (and I think some initial treatments out there) but it's still early days. I know dad was hooked up to a pair of headphones and a computer and they played him something that effectively "switched off" the tinnitus that he did have, but they said they weren't yet able to miniaturise the technology in to a hearing aid. No idea what it was doing!

 

A plea to anybody who thinks hearing loss is the end - it isn't! Never ever let it get so bad that something similar to the reported story happens. Hearing aids aren't the whistling lumps that they used to be. They're very clever, can be hidden in-ear (dad's have a tiny cable that links to the earphone, with the body of the unit behind his ear and coloured to match his hair colour). They do work and they are getting better daily. I can recommend a great private audiologist in the Yorkshire area if anybody needs to speak to one. They "get" music - they do custom IEM's for A list acts as well as hearing aids. Very specialist audiologists not your run of the mill hearing aid place.

[paulears]

I was pretty shocked at the course eq curve the NHS provide my mum, who is very deaf in one ear and has no hearing in the other. The spread of frequencies is really quite blunt - only about 5 or 6 frequencies across the range, so looking at the curve the machine produced, it really just shows the broad problem. It's good to know that proper devices are available, and at a decent quality. I suspect the NHS (and I'm supportive of the NHS really) just don;t devote enough time and funds to the elderly - If I needed some assistance, I don't think the thing mum has is much use - especially as she doesn't have the vocabulary to describe sound - she says to the audiologist - "it vibrates" - I've no idea what she means. Is it really vibrating, or distorted or what?

[Simon Lewis]

Interesting that when cold called by the people who ask if you have a hearing problem caused by your work, and you say yes - they can't help if you say you worked with loud music? Foundry workers, pneumatic drillers fine - drums, no!

 

Quite a simple explanation... there is an established legal framework regarding compensation claims for Noise Induced Hearing Loss (especially within a number of specific industries). Although it could extend to entertainment noise, many would be self employed and many would be exposed to noise as part of leisure activities.

 

Cedd,

 

Craig Gill is sadly not the first and again sadly won't be the last person to take their own life as a result of tinnitus. The issues facing sufferers are distinct and different from the issues of hearing loss, although the latter can exacerbate the former.

 

Whilst it is really great to hear what has been done for your father, pretty much the same technology and (with a bit of patience) a similar level of support can be had from the NHS. Sometimes it's knowing what questions to ask...

 

Simon

 

 

Paul,

 

The "run of the mill" fitting carried out by most audiologists will include air and bone pure tone audiometry (octave band, 250Hz - 8kHz). Once measured, the hearing aid has the inverse hearing loss curve applied to the aid but the output at the eardrum is measured using a very small, soft tube placed in the ear canal. This allows the effect of the ear canal to be seen and taken into account.

 

There are some very clever tricks that can be carried out in DSP in the aid. Multi band compression, directivity, some degree of binaural behaviour, near field communication (often to a Bluetooth dongle), multiple programmes etc. are quite common. Have a look at this brochure...

 

Two areas where this stuff falls down though... 1) the elderly - who have become deaf and who have poor coping strategies - and who cannot handle the technology. 2) Those who have had hearing aids most of their lives and are used to the 'manage it yourself' analogue aids which of course are no longer available. For them, having aids compressing, changing directivity or shifting out of hearing band frequencies into the speech band in an attempt to increase ineligibility "sounds" wrong - just as Cedd's father has found out!

 

Simon

[Jivemaster]

From an article in a Sunday supplement I read years ago, several name performers have retired because of tinnitius. Initially noise induced tinnitus subsides over days or weeks, but with continued noise exposure the decay time increases til it's effectively life long. There are performers who have retired from performing so as not to trigger another bout of tinnitus.

[paulears]

I'm an occasional tinnitus sufferer - I just don't have the tolerance for loud sound any longer, and I really don't like IEMs for playing, unless everything is controlled, I put up with them for the ability to simply turn down. In my mum's case, it is the technology - she has a number of things programmed in, but inadvertently prods the button jamming the thing in her ear, and it just doesn't click that maybe it sounds different? She just assumes that's as good as it gets. She often says it sounds 'funny' today, so she took it out! I get her to press the buttons and she says it's working again, but it doesn't stick. Her iPad is flat - she had tucked the charger plug in between the case and the pad, and just thought it needed a while - scary getting old.

[Simon Lewis]

....In my mum's case, it is the technology -

 

That's one of the main reasons hearing aids have moved towards a simple "do it for you" approach. Most users could not articulate what it is they need to change to make things better for them, so changes in level etc. are taken care of by the clever aid and its DSP.

 

 

The dispensers are used to having to second guess what's best for the person with hearing loss, so put together a programme that should work for them. It's only infrequently that a Cedd Senior turns up and says exactly what they want to hear!

[GridGirl]

There are ways and means of dealing with tinnitus if you get it in the early stages - while you can't make it go away, you can trick your brain into effectively "turning it down" - you have to train your brain to treat it as something unimportant that doesn't need listening to so it tunes it out. We recently had a session with an audiologist who specialises in tinnitus management and it was very interesting. I have intermittent tinnitus - it's worst when I wake up, for whatever reason - but I don't get it when I'm concentrating on something else, or if I do, I don't hear it. I could see how an extreme case could be debilitating though.

 

As I have said many times on this forum, we have a very comprehensive hearing conservation strategy, our dreadful orchestra pit doesn't help us so we have to be very proactive about prevention of hearing damage, given that there isn't much in the way of a cure. The technology in terms of hearing protection (as well as hearing aids - Cedd, your dad's system sounds amazing!) has come a long long way and we're getting better results all the time. The issue we are tackling is that players get new earplugs, try them for half an hour while playing and say "I can't do this, it all sounds too different" without spending time getting accustomed to the different way things sound with the plugs in. There's a horn player in one of our sister orchestras who is also an audiologist and whenever he comes to speak to our players (which is fairly regularly!) he has to hammer home the idea that you have to spend time with the plugs in, not just discount them after a short trial period. And when people do spend the time, the results are worth it - we have a trumpet player whose hearing didn't change between his first hearing test when he started with us, and a subsequent test six years later.

[Stuart91]

From an article in a Sunday supplement I read years ago, several name performers have retired because of tinnitius. Initially noise induced tinnitus subsides over days or weeks, but with continued noise exposure the decay time increases til it's effectively life long. There are performers who have retired from performing so as not to trigger another bout of tinnitus.

 

I wonder if, these days, the stage sound could be managed carefully enough to prevent the onset of tinnitus in cases like this? You can put everyone on IEMs, isolate the backline, and modern FOH systems are directional enough that the spill back onto stage is manageable.

 

It might not be as much "fun" as rocking out on a stage full of wedges and Marshall stacks, but surely it's a better option than sitting at home without a source of income?

[kerry davies]

Doing the safety passport I had a few bullet points I tried to get across. The first being that a couple of hundred quid om a set of custom moulded plugs was more cost effective than the thousands you can now spend on hearing aids.

The next was the utterly shameless emotional blackmail; "Did you know that the first bit of your hearing to go is when you can't hear; I love you Granddad."

Then I would tell them that tests were free in Boots.

 

Most people take it on board but the law of diminishing returns means we need to keep bashing the topic. We older guys all know the DJs, singers and musicians with NIHL and tinnitus but as we successfully address the problems the first hand experience of subsequent generations lessens. The better we are the harder we need to work at improvement.

[Jivemaster]

The big issue now is that the ear bud age is well upon us and much of today's youth has the start of NIHL before they leave school. No amount of protection will replace existing loss.

[J Pearce]

Out of interest I did some rough and ready tests at brass band rehearsal last night (on an iPhone that I've checked calibration against a half decent SLM).

 

Sat in percussion but not playing (in a reasonable size room with plenty of broadband absorption from fibreglass panels) the band were easily breaking 100dB(A). That's louder than I often mix the metal band I production manage!