Hearing Providers attitude towards frequency lowering

I definitely wouldn’t recommend for music, ESPECIALLY if music is important. What hearing aids do you have and what frequency lowering system do they use. There should be a setting where you can can’t even tell if FL is on. If you wan’t I can send you links to a ton of info on frequencly lowering and how to adjust.

Yeah. I think I’ll try it again turned way down on one of the programs I use for social events and noisy places. That way I could switch to that for just speech and back to the ones without it for everything else.

It’s not that I don’t think it could be very useful. It’s just the pitches not matching that was really annoying me even turned down low. I have the Widex, which seems to be a decent algorithm for what it’s designed for. But, I do have problem with F’s and S’s, so I’ll try it again as low as I can make it that still helps.

I use the Oticon Speech Rescue frequency lowering and I include it in my built-in Music program as well and I don’t notice that the music sounds awful to me, be it recorded music, or when I play the piano myself. It still sounds natural enough for me.

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if it’s the nature of that frequency lowering technology doing more transposition and composition and less compression that helps make the music still sound natural enough or what. I’m not a professional musician by any means, but I think I’m musically inclined enough as an amateur to be able to tell a difference, at least if there’s an obvious and gross difference. I was in a band in my earlier years, and I play the piano at home just for fun now.

I wonder if any Oticon users who read this thread and use the Oticon Speech Rescue may want to chime in and share their experience specific to how the music sounds to them with Speech Rescue on.

I’m aware that @SpudGunner is a serious guitarist at the pro level who’s an Oticon More 1 wearer, and if I remember correctly, I think he uses Speech Rescue as well, although I don’t remember if he has it turned on for the Music program or not. Hopefully he can chime in to this thread and share his experience with the Oticon Speech Rescue for music.

But any other folks who wears Oticon and use Speech Rescue, please chime in to share as well, whether you think it’s usable for music or not for you personally -> @cvkemp, @flashb1024, @billgem, @Abarsanti, @gkumar, @JeremyDC, @michael.letizia, @member45, @anon66854306 etc. I know we have lots of Oticon users on this forum, sorry if I can’t remember all to include more.

My hearing loss isn’t the type that speech rescue would work for. I have lost my hearing mostly in the 1500 to 4000 range and it improves at the upper frequencies a little bit. My loss started as a cookie bite hearing loss and I am now losing my upper frequencies as I get older. Not sure what will happen in the future f I lose more of my mid and upper frequencies.

@flashb1024 said:

Don’t you find vocals to be distorted in MyMusic with live or recorded music over speakers?

I can’t say as I do. I usually don’t pay much attention to vocals, so I haven’t noticed, really. I’ll listen more carefully and report back.

@SpudGunner said:

I can’t say as I do. I usually don’t pay much attention to vocals, so I haven’t noticed, really. I’ll listen more carefully and report back.

You had mentioned enjoying Norah Jones, so I figure she’d be a good example.
Not McKinley Morganfield

@flashb1024 said:

I’m in the no speech rescue camp, although I’ve never tried it.
As I approach the really profound loss of highs, it may be in my future.

Funny, when I trialed the Phonak Marvel’s last year, the audi enabled Phonak’s sound recover feature, and didn’t tell me.
I was shocked when I heard sounds I was familiar with sounding totally distorted.

If you plan to continue with DIY in the future (I remember that the VA wasn’t too thrilled to learn that you did), it may be worth trying out Speech Rescue to see if it’s helpful for you or not. I think your hearing loss is a candidate for it.

It’d also be interesting to see what you think of Speech Rescue compared to the SoundRecover 2 in the Marvel, specifically when it comes to using it for music.

@SpudGunner said:

Yeah, but I stream all the good stuff.

See, that’s what I mean, streaming is good.
Oh oh, we’re taking this thread in a new direction.
We may be in trouble w/ the op

If I had your hearing loss, I would want to use one of the lowest configurations toward the left, like the 2.4 configuration that has the 1.7 - 2.4 KHz range because that’s where you still have the better hearing. I’d leave the High Frequency Bands to ON so the original amplification is left enable just like if you didn’t have any frequency lowering. This way you only get the lowered sounds added on top. I’d start out with either the default strength (or milder strength) first and adjust from there.

If you want to do on the fly A/B comparison, and you have enough programs available, you can have the default program without it, and a second similar program with it turned on.

Thanks, I copied that over to my to-do for the More list.

@Volusiano said:

… a recurring complain that frequency lowering seems to distort music grossly …

I can’t see why there wouldn’t be music distortion. Since an intrinsic element of musical notes is frequency, when that frequency is lowered, there must necessarily be an alteration of pitch and hence distortion. Surely?
Genuinely looking for enlightenment here!
(I put the same question to my audiologist (in discussing Phonak’s Sound Recover) and found him at a bit of a loss.)

Yes, any kind of frequency lowering would be distortion in the strictest sense of the semantic because you’re adding coloration to the original content.

So if the word distortion is being observed in its strictest sense here, then I would want to rephrase it as “unpleasant musical aberration” instead.

If you use compression to lower the frequency, the whole spectrum of the range is compressed, so with everything squished in, the aberration may become more noticeable.

If you minimize the compression and copy a chunk of the higher range and transpose it to a lower range, BUT leaving the original higher range intact and amplified just as it would be like before, then you’re just adding on top and not altering what was there before. If what you’re adding on top doesn’t disturb the harmonics as badly as squishing everything does, the whole musical sound may be still acceptable, especially if you can control the volume amount of what you’re adding on top.

For purists, if you listen to music only, of course you don’t want to add anything to it. But if you’re in a mixed environment where you need that frequency lowering for better speech intelligibility, and there’s also background music going on, or if you’re watching a movie with both speech and music combined, if you don’t find the musical aberration to be unacceptable, then it’d be a good compromise to have in that mixed environment just so you can also hear the dialogs in the movies better.

That was my intention originally when I added Speech Rescue to my default program, and I didn’t have it in my music program. But then I noticed that I didn’t mind how the music sounds very much when I watched movies. And because I’m not a purist when it comes to music, and would rather be able to hear some of the highs in music (that I have lost entirely due to my severe high frequency loss) instead of hearing duller music, so I added Speech Rescue to my Music program as well and I’ve been happy with it.

@Volusiano said:

Yes, any kind of frequency lowering would be distortion in the strictest sense of the semantic because you’re adding coloration to the original content

Thanks for responding in detail, Volusiano.
My point is that, rather than “adding coloration to the original content”, frequency lowering would seem to actually change the original content so that, for example, the pitch of a note at 11 kHz, is lowered to, say, 8 kHz, and so necessarily becomes a different note, and hence introduces distortion. Not so?

Yes, I understand your point. But you don’t lose the original note and you can fully hear the original note just the same as before, so the pitch of the note is never lost or altered and becomes a different note like you think.

Now how about the copy of that note being lowered? Does it have the same pitch or not? That’s not clear, but remember that the highs that get transposed that are being lowered are mostly timbres and high end harmonics and not pure notes, so if they are not just pure tones, and you still hear the pure tones loud and clear, then your musical perception is still intact and not greatly altered. You end up hearing the high end timbres and harmonics that you would miss anyway. The question is whether the high end timbres and harmonics blend well with the original musical content or not. To me, they seem to blend well.

I’m including below a screenshot of the Speech Rescue whitepaper that talks about how they use the ERB (width of the cochlear bandpass filters) to make frequency selection to follow the natural perceptual arrangement to minimize distortion. I know that’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo that I don’t understand myself. But intuitively, I interpret it to mean that they’re using some kind of knowledge about how the cochlear works to make the lowered sounds blend in well with the original sounds.