I could not hear anyone in any crowded situation. At middle age I thought my hearing was leaving. Yet every audiologist I went to said my hearing was fine. So I found the best audiologist in my fairly large metro area, and scheduled a year in advance (the wait list was that long).
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.
> 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.
- "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)
If you’re near Berkeley, CA, one of the owners of the restaurant Comal also owns a sound company that builds that kind of system, and they use Comal as a showplace. The effect is astounding - it’s an industrial-style design, and it’s got auditory “ambiance”, but you can have a full conversation at normal speaking volumes with everyone at the table. It’s the kind of thing where once you experience it, you’ll judge the hell out of any other “fancy” restaurant you go to that doesn’t have it.
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).
Yep, that's the place. When you go there, two things to look for - one is the ring of speakers around 10ft up on the walls, and the other is the forest of small capsule-shaped microphones hanging from the ceiling. It's a really impressive system, although AIUI it's ludicrously expensive - it's there for marketing, Comal did not pay full price for the system.
Should've guessed! I'd really love to find more places with similar systems & investments in acoustics. It makes such a huge difference in the experience.
> 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.
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.
Stuff that works well in homes often is a lot more complicated to implement in restaurants, where you're: a) constantly fighting grease buildup and hard-to-remove dust that clings to greasy or damp surfaces, b) often have a profit margin of like 2% if you're one of the successful ones, c) aside from looking clean, you have to worry about pest control, fire codes, health codes (you can't have built-up dust falling in people's food, d) etc etc etc etc. Also, how restaurants look is as, or in some cases more important than the quality of the food. A good, attractive, practical restaurant design is one of the things that can steer you towards success or failure. Much to many chefs chagrin, hip and attractive restaurants with shitty boring food are often more profitable than ones that only focus on the food. Marketing is annoyingly important.
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.
Unrelated blathering because a lot of folks in tech don't have much exposure to this stuff and I always enjoy seeing a slice of someone else's life: In general a lot of people are understandably perplexed by seemingly simple, avoidable problems that they encounter in restaurants-- you can chalk almost all of them up to misinformation, or deliberately obfuscated factors. Firstly, there's a ton of inaccurate folk knowledge about the way restaurants work... (most infuriatingly to me is the food safety stuff. Look up the incubation time for most foodborne illnesses and consider how many people blame some lower GI symptoms the meal that met their stomach lining 3 hours earlier.) Also, a big part of the restaurant mystique is making it all seem sort of easy, uncomplicated, and fun, even for regulars and the 'friends and family' crowd; underneath that thin veneer, it's absolute insanity. I've worked in tech and the restaurant business extensively. Most days, the pressure level is "we just discovered a possible active intruder in our production systems" for at least a few hours. It's exhausting, and one of the reasons drug and alcohol addiction is so prevalent. Knowing that an entire staff is breaking their back so you can have a fun cozy bite to eat makes the experience palpably worse, but it's true. That's why you'll usually find people who've worked in the service industry are serious over-tippers. You have to give up a lot of your humanity to do that work, and a lot of people you encounter respect you less instead of more for having made that sacrifice.
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.
There definitely are but, perhaps by definition, items soft enough to dampen sound are often easily damaged so they aren’t great fits for most commercial locations.
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.
Honestly the cheapest way to muffle sound is to not create it in the first place. Guests make noise to hear themselves over other guests and the din of the room, the quieter the room, the quieter the guests, etc.
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.
High-end places not only still have bad margins, they're quite often worse!
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.
Yeah, by integrating art with sound-absorbing materials, it's possible to enhance the acoustic environment and the interior design. I wonder if there is a place where foam art is on display?
When i studied architecture we had a course that included a sound design aspect - learned some formulas, did some real world testing in various environments (theater, studio, restaurant, bedroom) using microphones to analyze sources of unwanted noise, sound reflection and distortion. The assignment for that class included proposing various fixes some of which we tested.
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.
> restaurants can have good sound design, but it doesn't come cheap.
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.
> Carpet the ceiling and the walls. Super cheap, super effective.
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.
No we have this, it just isn't as cheap as floor carpeting.
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.
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.
My source is the IBC section 803 (1), which I only know about because I've had the misfortune of needing to know about getting building permits for acoustically treating an office space in my career (which itself is a long and boring story about a failed startup).
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.
There’s something called Auditory Processing Disorder where you are not able to able to differentiate sound and it supposedly can develop later in life.
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.
Thank you for the name of this disorder and link! I've also had this my whole life, and I knew it was a thing that wasn't terribly rare (based on reading comments from others in the past, here on HN and elsewhere), but I think this is the first time I've seen a name for this condition.
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
You may not have hearing loss, but you might actually benefit from modern hearing aids which can attenuate background noise better than consumer noise cancelling headphones. My partner has APD and hearing aids were a life-changer for them.
Consumer stuff is also getting better really quickly though
My reply here may be useful to you - where I mention Berard AIT (Auditory Integration Training) and my own experience with hearing difficulties, which I was able to solve with AIT at age 23 (now 41): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40516028
Thanks for this. I also have this, but I never bothered to look up if this is a recognized thing (of course it is) and what it's called since it seemed unlikely that anything could be done about it.
> ...restaurant and public space designers have stopped thinking about sound.
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.
Designers for bars and clubs will take the clientele into account in subtle sensory ways. One once told me how he designed a club known to cater to those having trysts-- it had many isolated booths where the lighting prevented seeing into the booths from the main areas.
I resorted to wearing earplugs for several years when I was going out more. I felt it did very little to reduce my ability to hear conversations, and it made the whole experience overall so much more pleasant.
Lowering the volume can help with the SNR, because neither the signal, the noise, nor the lowering effect caused by earplugs are consistent with respect to frequency. Highly objectionable, harsh 4-8 kHz noise that might echo around a concrete and steel venue is blocked well by good earplugs, while low-frequency 100-400 Hz speech is ineffectively blocked.
I wonder if anyone has made a set of earplugs that specifically target attenuation so that primary speech frequencies are less affected. I know foamies roll off HF aggressively (looks like 2k is the knee point[1])
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.
I like Etymotic (https://www.etymotic.com). The design lowers the decibels without affecting the sound too much. I used to play in a band with a drummer who always wore their high-end plugs which you have to have molded to your ear canals, but they also make cheaper standardized ones that do a good job.
The cheap etymotic plugs are great value. I always have a pair on my keyring. The advantage over foam plugs is that the attenuation is more linear so you don’t feel so weird wearing them.
Loops are great as a sibling comment mentioned but I had to have very loud dehumidifiers in my house all weekend; I've been walking around with my Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 3s in transparency mode (i.e. uses microphones to play sound from the outside into the headphone), and it's been amazing. It cut the audio to a maximum level and let me discern conversations more easily than folks not wearing anything.
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.
On the cheap, Earasers. They're small enough that they're almost invisible, and they're designed to attenuate roughly evenly across the audible spectrum. That makes them great for concerts, but other folks here claim that the top-heavy attentuation profile of non-music specific earplugs is actually better for speech.
Ha. Classic techie parachuting in and incorrectly intuiting how something works. Show me earplugs that REDUCE equally across all frequencies and I’ll invest every dollar I have to my name.
> Show me earplugs that REDUCE equally across all frequencies and I’ll invest every dollar I have to my name.
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).
That's not entirely true, if you're selectively lowering the volume of different frequencies it might solve the problem. The only problem with that is that earplugs tend to reduce high frequencies more than low frequencies, but background noise is mostly low frequencies. Earplugs might help you hear people in a machine shop with a lot of high frequency noises though.
For decades now, when I enter a bar or restaurant I turn down the volume of my hearing aid. Not because everything is too loud, but because it allows me to hear spoken speech much better. It doesn't work quite as well on modern digital hearing aids as it did on older analog, and I don't fully understand the mechanics of it, but it's what I do.
Except it absolutely will help you discern speech. The sound blocking is not uniform across all frequencies and most speech is not blocked very well. So earplugs will make speech 20% quieter but will also make all the nonsense going on around you 70% quieter. So the speech will be easier to hear assuming you don't have $3 Wish earplugs.
I've got a similar thing; I can't pull most song lyrics out of the song, and any significant amount of background noise means lip reading for me. Hearing's all fine, it's the processing that doesn't work quite right.
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.
Ditto here. An audiologist recommended something called LACE therapy, but it wasn't cheap so at the time I didn't go for it - I need to look into it, and see if it's a legitimate treatment for this, or snake-oil.
I would not say it's snake oil, but it will only help if you've learned some helplessness or are bad at thinking about what someone is saying while they are speaking. A hearing aid or filter is always going to be more helpful if you only can pick one treatment.
But that's the thing, I'm in the similar position to others in the chain - last week, an audiologist said my hearing was tremendously good. But if there's noise around me, I cannot process what people are saying.
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?")
> 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.
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?)
Two real examples I knew: someone who started interrupting people mid-sentence to get clarification, and someone whose mind started going blank when other people were talking.
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.
The parent poster’s word choice was perhaps uncharitable, but my read is helplessness is not equitable to idiocy. To me, it’s more the difference between actively trying to understand the conversation vs letting it tune out as a default.
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.
In neuroplasticity, the saying "nerves that fire together wire together" means that when neurons are activated simultaneously, their connections become stronger. If your life is filled with constant background noise, it can make your brain's ability to distinguish specific sounds less precise. To improve your auditory discrimination, it is helpful to spend time listening to clear, distinct sounds, such as slow classical music. This practice helps to refine and strengthen the neural pathways associated with each sound, enhancing your ability to differentiate between them over time.
I'm one of those annoying ADHD people who will hear everything you're saying, ask "What?," and then a second later I've finished processing the audio in my head and am ready to continue the conversation. Similarly, I can't readily differentiate voices from melody in songs. Far too many songs don't have strong enough vocal tracks and the songs might as well just be mud to me. I suppose it's why I gravitated towards rap and R&B growing up.
> [...] ADHD people who will hear everything you're saying, ask "What?," and then a second later I've finished processing the audio in my head and am ready to continue the conversation.
You know, until you mentioned it, I'd never thought that that experience might have an ADHD-related component to it. Interesting.
I am like you, I have extremely sensitive hearing.
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'
Dunno whether you really need more than your hands to communicate when listening to a band in that situation. At least until you get to more than 10 people that need a beer.
The one thing that annoys me about restaurants and other crowded places... is the insistence on playing music to attempt(?) to cover the sound!
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.
There are some restaurants we don't often go to because they are too loud to be enjoyable. Luckily its patio weather most of the year here in California so eating outside is generally much quieter and enjoyable.
I also have trouble discerning sounds in crowded spaces. Thanks for sharing your diagnosis, really interesting to think about.
Have you tried earplugs like Loop or Eargasm? I’ve considered them for a while, but never pulled the trigger. Reddit seemed to prefer Loops to Eargasms.
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 share the same trait. Thought I was going deaf as I couldn’t hear people talking at crowded places but my hearing tests always return ok. Great to know I’m not alone at this.
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!
Not to act like an arm-chair doctor but have you ever considered that you may be on the ASD spectrum?
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.
It can also happen with ADHD. I seem to have difficulty integrating sensory information and thinking at the same time. If it’s noisy, it causes a series of buffer overflows at every level of cognition.
Yep, I have ADHD and have always needed to put more effort toward parsing a particular sound in a dense sound field than other people. I've also always had trouble quickly identifying a particular object in a dense visual field. My wife jokes I'm "the world's worst 'Where's Waldo' player".
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've also always had trouble quickly identifying a particular object in a dense visual field.
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'll first ask the question of do you remember if you had any ear infections as a child - and were they painful at all?
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.
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.
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.