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
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.
My issue with foam earplugs is that they're too good at attenuating. I end up wearing them partially inserted, which is ok as long as you're staying still. If you are at a concert, or you're eating, or you have long hair, you'll disturb them.
[1]: https://www.offshorenorge.no/globalassets/dokumenter/drift/s...
It has been a long time since I worked tangentially with frequencies, but IIRC it physically isn't possible to block/dampen all frequencies of sound. Although due to different physical phenomena, this is why everything has a color and nothing is truly black - it is impossible for a material to suck in every wavelength of light.
Here's a publication featuring ear protection products for musicians that attempts to do this. It's not perfect but it's pretty good (I own a set of custom earmolds with the Etymotic filters).
If the band is playing zip it!
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?)
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.
Behavioral training like LACE can be helpful for people who started doing things like that to cope with a hearing problem, but an audiologist should be looking at a filter (with APD you can be prescribed a filter for one ear even if you have no hearing loss, depending on your diagnosis.)
Neither case had anything to do with intelligence as demonstrated in every area of their life outside of hearing processing.
I and these others have auditory processing disorder as well.
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.
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.
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)
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.
And there was only that one picture.
Wood floors, rugs, curtains, artwork, acoustic panels, etc.
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.
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.
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.
dampen means to make something wet, or at least originally that's what it meant
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.
Low-end places are often even more carefully designed, though, but they're designed for different things: high turnover and low staff wages, meaning simple, flat, easy-to-clean (and sanitize), nearly-zero-maintenance surfaces like bare laminated tabletops and quarry tiles. Especially once you start moving into fast casual, they want their diners comfortable enough to enjoy their meal, but not comfortable enough to linger, which is often a tough balance to strike.
The look of high-end places is like putting your sales people in nice suits. I don't think most places are trying to maximize throughput-- if they're not completely booked at least a few nights per week they're probably not staying open-- I think they're trying to maximize check averages. Nothing inspires "maybe I'll get the dry aged wagyu app and flip to the expensive page in the wine list tonight" thoughts like a luxe dining room.
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.
In fact, if you ever DIY some acoustic gobos or panels, rockwool insulation is about the best material you can find at the hardware store. But like another comment mentioned there are other concerns in commercial spaces, like cleaning/dusting.
The way the building code is written doesn't explicitly ban any material from walls/ceilings, but rather sets the constraints on the performance of the material when exposed to heat. There are higher limits for walls/ceilings than for floors because flames climb. Wall coverings (including wall paper and its glue) have to be flame retardant to meet code. There have been some infamous fires in the past, which is why this code exists (building codes are written in blood, as they say).
Most carpet doesn't go on walls, so it doesn't meet code, unlike wallpaper. And building inspectors are conservative people that are unlikely to permit you to do anything weird, even if you can prove by the letter of the IBC that some material is up to snuff.
(1) https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IBC2021P2/chapter-8-interi...
Scroll down to see the details on wall textiles, specifically.
This is jurisdiction-dependent. Not all jurisdictions in the US, for example, have adopted the IBC, and it's not uncommon to find carpeted walls in movie theaters.
I should preface by saying that I have some existing tinnitus that developed from playing drums in rock bands in my 20's without proper ear protection. It's manageable and quiet enough that it can be largely ignored.
Recently I visited Las Vegas, and I ate at the well known restaurant Tao. It was so incredibly loud, for a sustained period of time, that it triggered the tinnitus in my left ear to such an extent that I was essentially deaf in my left ear the next morning. It gradually receded to loud ringing, and then was back to my "normal" level of tinnitus after a couple of weeks.
I guess I'll have to bring my own hearing protection to restaurants now. Kind of a sad state of affairs.
It was really interesting but sometimes large scale interventions have potential tradeoffs with other desirable project criteria and goals. At the end of the day the client and the budget make a lot of decisions that seem careless but are just tradeoffs.
As you say - upscale and boutique businesses often have the desire and budget to differentiate themselves on sound design - having professionals consult is not inexpensive and often implementing their recommendations has a significant effect on budget.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.”
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
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. ;)
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
Consumer stuff is also getting better really quickly though
You know, until you mentioned it, I'd never thought that that experience might have an ADHD-related component to it. Interesting.
I also have trouble discerning sounds in crowded spaces. Thanks for sharing your diagnosis, really interesting to think about.
My solution to this problem is to carry on my keychain a pair of concert rated hearing protection earbuds. It's not a perfect solution, but you'd be surprised at how helpful it is to have some highs and lows filtered out.
Only downside beyond not being perfect, is people tend to think I put them in to block sound entirely. So I usually end up fielding questions about what they are, with a resulting 'man that's a smart idea'
Ymmv
Not sure if audiologists phoning it in will know how to test for the latter
It sounds like that audiologist still wasn't specialized enough - otherwise I feel like your story would have extended differently; high demand mainstream audiologists, including the mainstream audiologist profession, don't seem to have a certain lineage of knowledge that I dramatically benefit from first when I was 23 (now 41), when I was in essentially a high-functioning Asperger's state - to where my hearing had devolved into a hyperacusis state - a severe hypersensitivity to sound - but where prior to that I had the same symptoms of difficulty with conversation, and busy rooms with lots of noise was extremely mentally draining-fatiguing, not realizing it was putting my mind on overdrive drying to actively focus and hone in on sounds vs. it autonomously happening.
Have you ever heard of Berard AIT (Auditory Integration Training/Therapy) or the Tomatis method? There's a book on the sound therapies called "Hearing Equals Behavior: Updated and Expanded."
There's a non-standard audiogram to check for imbalances in the hearing. The standard audiogram is they just pick say 30 Dbs volume and check various frequencies in each ear at that frequency, and if you can hear that - then "great!" The non-standard audiogram checking for imbalances checks for HOW LOW-QUIET of a sound you can hear at different frequencies, and interestingly, with 100% accuracy you can predict a set of behaviours that a person will have if they have an imbalance at certain frequencies like 1000 Hz; not all frequencies have associated behaviours with them.
An example of an imbalance would be if at 1000 Hz in your left ear the lowest sound you could hear was 15 Dbs, but in right ear you could hear at 10 Dbs - an imbalance of 5 Dbs, but where the idea is that the body-brain-mind is a system of finding homeostasis and equilibrium, so it should be able to have it so sounds are heard at the same level - evenly, save for actual physical damage. This is just a simple example and there can be high peaks and valleys that show up in the non-standard audiogram.
I have a similar story as yours. My issues with sound were almost identified in Grade 2 when going from a kindergarten setting, where there were no real performance or attention expectations, to Grade 2. The teacher noted I was having trouble paying attention. They thought maybe I had hearing issues, it was a private school and so they brought in an audiologist. My hearing was fantastic! So indeed, unfortunately, 30+ years ago especially they didn't consider that my hearing could be "too good" - where sound was overwhelming me; so I was hypersensitive to sound, arguably hyposensitive to touch and other senses, and it was medications in my late teens and early 20s that caused my hearing to get super hypersensitive - to the point where I was in what I consider a torture state for 8 months - where even the sound of blinking was painful, or at least that was the sensory I was associating the pain with - until I was forced to do my own research and eventually stumbled into Berard AIT.
There's also pre-care questionnaires that some practitioners offer - a checklist for behaviour of a child, and also of an adult, where I had ~80% of the behaviours both as a child and as an adult, e.g. preferred to sit in the back or corner of a classroom, essentially as there'd be less directions noise would be coming from, had trouble relaying a story or following instructions, etc.
Adult checklist: https://www.aithelps.com/auditory_care_adults.php
Child checklist: https://www.aithelps.com/auditory_care.php
NOTE: these places started offering "home programs" to send some audio equipment and the specially modified music, however I won't personally trust them until I've had the chance to do what I'd consider to be thoroughly done research to compare the original high-quality sound equipment that would produce the absolute highest quality of frequencies vs. what the rentable-shippable equipment produces.
Someday I need to write a chapter of a book or perhaps a whole book on my experiences of it all - the before and after state, the blocked development process (e.g. autistic state) that got unblocked and the development process that began to unlock - essentially I was blocked from processing emotions properly, so I arguably had a lifelong backlog of unprocessed memories with emotions associated with them needing to be labeled to be organized, as well as PTSD from many very intense traumatic years.
Is there a name for this condition?
I’m not from the US but I visit often and could not understand this trend of party restaurants where you eat at club level sound blasting all around you. It’s the worst of both worlds, since you can’t talk with the loud music nor can dance since you’re sitting down.
Paraphrasing the great Donald Glover, I’m too old for this $hit!
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.