A hearing aid would be great in party environments for me.
My father and my daughter have the same condition, so I’m reasonable certain it is inherited.
Is there a name for this?
When I was 15, something similar started happening to me but even during one on one conversations. Someone would say something, I would hear the sounds, but wasn’t able to really make sense of it (and reply) for a few seconds.
When tested, my hearing was perfect. I never dug too much into it, and eventually it got a lot better. It still happens sometimes in some situations though.
Would be great to learn more about it if you have any additional info.
There's no point in getting formally diagnosed because there's not really any treatment so save the money, but it's sometimes just nice to know it has a name and something to Google.
EQ alone is quite primitive though compared to the computing power that we have available. If you're capturing audio from both ears, it wouldn't be hard to filter out anything other than directly in front of you. If you're sitting across a table from someone in a loud restaurant, you could let all the audio in normally, vibe to the music, but duck the volume on all the background noise when a human voice is detected directly in front of you.
They didn’t do “virtual sidechaining” like you describe, but possibly could have with the DSPs in the earbuds. I’d love to find a replacement for them.
https://m.apkpure.com/here-one/com.dopplerlabs.hereone
Run it through VirusTotal if you're in sight about the APK's provenance,
Don't let this type of planned obsolescence rule your access to your devices. That is, assuming the app works without some sort of cloudy backing - but then I guess it should of it was to be used in places where network access can be spared or non-existent?
It's not quite a walk in the park, because you only have very small latency budgets.
You may have ADP/KKS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
Learning about this helped me immensely deal with my own struggles of hearing voices with background noise.
In my case, I believe it's from operating a stump grinder without ear protection. (Doh!) I've been tested, there is a narrow range where my hearing is impaired. Otherwise, I hear very well.
Put me in a restaurant, I spend about half my time lip-reading and context matching to figure out what the person across from me said.
My hearing itself is well within normal sensitivity when tested (well, it's getting worse, but even that's normal as I age). It's just whatever processing people do to turn sound into parsed language is difficult for me. Even people's houses that have a TV going 24x7 are problematic for me to have a conversation.
If I focus on a single person, I can usually have a normal conversation with them and them only, at the expense of blocking out literally everyone and everything else. So, could be worse, but it would be nice to be able to keep up in crowded rooms more easily.
It's not too uncommon, and is tremendously common among people with ADHD, dyslexia, and people on the spectrum.
Whatever it is, I definitely have it. One thing that helps me a ton is just focusing directly on people's lips when they're talking in a noisy setting. I can't read lips (at all), but the extra little bit of visual information helps me a great deal with comprehension.
I had a fairly rapid decrease in my high frequency hearing (basically my ears aged 20 years in a few months), and the biggest indicator to me was how much harder it was to understand dialogue in loud shows. I was turning on subtitles and/or turning the volume up where before I was fine with a fairly quiet volume.
Or am I just being really dumb?
Conversation Boost for AirPods Pro helps you better hear conversations in crowded or noisy environments. Through computational audio and beamforming microphones, Conversation Boost focuses AirPods Pro on the voice of the person directly in front of you, making it easier to distinguish speech and follow along in face‑to‑face conversations.
Apple has all the tech needed to get this done, even in their existing product. I'm hopeful they will now feel they can release it. All I need is compression (amplification of soft sounds without over-amplification of loud sounds), equalization, and an app that allows me to make the necessary adjustments - with separate controls for exterior sound and the iOS audio chain.
For reference I had a friend whose hearing aids were doing this 15-20 years ago. He was able to have a conversation just fine in a crowded bar, whereas I couldn’t hear a thing over the din of background conversation.
If everyone was using a naive version of what's described: maybe?
If only a handful of people were using it: probably not.
And I'm sure you could exploit human psychology to engineer some way to keep the party as quiet on average as before.
(Slightly related, I heard of some gadget that projects someone's speech back at them with a slight delay. The effect is said to be so unnerving that untrained people stop talking altogether, or only haltingly. It's apparently been used to shut down protestors.)
I wonder if it would be more disconcerting with a varying delay. Long ago I saw a proposal to eliminate "feedback" in a Public Address system by putting in a delay line with variable delay.
But, the internal frame is partly plastic, and mine snapped. You have to be careful not to flex it much when taking it off. Now, I'm looking for fine weave carbon fiber cloth to fix it - I got it working once using superglue, but it broke again.
Meanwhile, Bose has completely exited the hearing aid sector.[0]
[0] https://www.hearingtracker.com/news/bose-cease-hearing-aid-s...
> Meanwhile, Bose has completely exited the hearing aid sector.
Sounds like they sold or partnered with Lexie, so some hope: https://lexiehearing.com/us/lexie-powered-by-bose-hearing-ai...
I imagine a role for being able to select between 3-4 enhancement personalities, just as one might wish to select between different self-driving personalities for different road and traffic conditions.
Also, given what I take to be a high proportion of non-use of hearing aids after a professional "fittting" or "tuning", I wonder what role for "at-home" A/B testing where a wearer can suggest better/worse between two different sets of adjustments.