[slow]

Hi All!
 
 
I was grappling with this problem - I gave up on ever appreciating wine beyond the point of "its red OR its not red" amongst other things. The one great pleasure I found was listening to music through headphones/IEMS because of a whole heap of self apparent and obvious reasons. This was a long time ago when I was in high school, and soon after that, the pursuit went into stasis.
 
Recently I revisited the whole concept of sound, appreciating it and also pursuing the journey of enjoying it to the fullest extent. That journey started in 2014 with a pair of Beyerdynamic T1 paired with the Corda Meier Dac and Amp in contrast with the HD800 with its own branded DAC+AMP and the cable enhancement Sennheiser made. These were the decisions I made by looking at forums, trying the HD800 against the LCD 2 and a heap of other cans and ultimately getting the two Germans. 
 
Before the recent enhancement of hardware, which has been diverse and manic; I decided to go back and ask the question - is it now the issue of better hardware? or is the issue of hearing?
 
Most of the music I listen to are from the late 90s, probably produced in sub-optimal conditions and what one would expect from a hardware change is variation in sound rather than any appreciable enhancement of it. The rate limiting steps even before one considers the hardware (at least as I understand it, and I would welcome any differences of opinion) are one's hearing and the quality of the source.
 
Lets ignore the source for this conversation and emphasize on the nature of hearing. You get old, it either stays the same or diminishes in its sensitivity. I went to an audiologist to get impressions and we had a conversation about this, they were gracious enough to then sit and do a hearing test. I noticed that the headphones etc they had in this soundproof room wasnt amazing stuff but it was the clinical standard [This is issue 1].
 
Subsequently I was told that I have a hearing of a 10 year old - at first I thought that meant it was underdeveloped. But apparently what the person meant was that it was very good. However, my experience of being mindful of music is non-existent. What is extant is just simply enjoying it, being aware of it but not conscious of it. I've never been able to differentiate between different instruments, and mid range sounds when the genre of music changes (e.g. from electronica to classical) nor have I been able to identify the different notes and musical instruments in complex compositions.
 
So here goes the question - to what extent do you guys think the natural limits of hearing affects your preference in what you listen from. Furthermore, does anyone maintain the view that you can condition yourself to enhance the finesse of your hearing regardless of minor or moderate setbacks in its perceptive quality?

 

[icebear]

I think the biological abilities of your hearing are only the prerequisite to listening to music. If there is nothing wrong, as in your case, then it's more an intellectual and educational thing that will let you explore and appreciate certain styles of music. Obviously if someone has a severe lack of sensitivity in higher frequencies, that person will have a hard time listening to violins.

 

[RRod]

  I think the biological abilities of your hearing are only the prerequisite to listening to music. If there is nothing wrong, as in your case, then it's more an intellectual and educational thing that will let you explore and appreciate certain styles of music. Obviously if someone has a severe lack of sensitivity in higher frequencies, that person will have a hard time listening to violins.

 
Highest fundamental on the violin is around 4kHz, so you only really get up to the 4th harmonic within human hearing. Non-harmonic content could of course be affected, but I think people with typical old-age hearing loss will hear a violin as a violin just fine.

 

[Evoked Response]

  So here goes the question - to what extent do you guys think the natural limits of hearing affects your preference in what you listen from. Furthermore, does anyone maintain the view that you can condition yourself to enhance the finesse of your hearing regardless of minor or moderate setbacks in its perceptive quality?

I certainly think that you can, to an extent, train yourself to listen for audio quality; but if you can't hear certain frequencies I wouldn't think that you could "learn" to hear them.
 
There is some interesting research on early language development and discriminating between two sounds that are very close together. If your brain doesn't learn to discriminate the sounds at a young age, then you lose a window of opportunity and will never be able to discriminate them. That's one reason that learning to speak a new language without an accent is so difficult as an adult.
 
So, I think it's certainly possible that people who grew up listening to a certain kind of music from a very early age may hear things that others do not, and that may increase their enjoyment of that music.

 

[castleofargh]

if there are tricks to compensate for the hearing loss, the brain is most likely already using them(our brains are way more clever than we are ^_^). there are trainings that can improve how we notice some things. it's not that we hear better, it's more like our brain gets trained to recognize a particular pattern and identify it. sometimes it looks like better hearing, but most of the time it's only a mater of calling a cat a cat. if you never heard a violin, you won't know how to call it. if you play the violin, what you will start noticing may be the way it's played more than just the idea that it's a violin. so it looks like your experience gets richer and you have more to talk about. but IMO and I insist on that, IMO^_^, anything we concentrate or learn to focus on, will take us away from something else. we don't have infinite processing capacity, the guy who doesn't care for the violin might spend a little more of his listening time on other instruments. while the guy who plays, might tend to dismiss the other instruments more(consciously or not), to focus more on what he likes.
 
it's fine not to know if the tone you're hearing is called a value in hertz, or a music letter, or a key on a piano, you're still hearing it. now to communicate with others, knowing how to name and take all the elements apart is a serious plus. but I don't think it makes you a better listener. just a different one.

 

[slow]

  if there are tricks to compensate for the hearing loss, the brain is most likely already using them(our brains are way more clever than we are ^_^). there are trainings that can improve how we notice some things. it's not that we hear better, it's more like our brain gets trained to recognize a particular pattern and identify it. sometimes it looks like better hearing, but most of the time it's only a mater of calling a cat a cat. if you never heard a violin, you won't know how to call it. if you play the violin, what you will start noticing may be the way it's played more than just the idea that it's a violin. so it looks like your experience gets richer and you have more to talk about. but IMO and I insist on that, IMO^_^, anything we concentrate or learn to focus on, will take us away from something else. we don't have infinite processing capacity, the guy who doesn't care for the violin might spend a little more of his listening time on other instruments. while the guy who plays, might tend to dismiss the other instruments more(consciously or not), to focus more on what he likes.
 
it's fine not to know if the tone you're hearing is called a value in hertz, or a music letter, or a key on a piano, you're still hearing it. now to communicate with others, knowing how to name and take all the elements apart is a serious plus. but I don't think it makes you a better listener. just a different one.

 
I wonder if there is self induced - neural adaptation. The current problem I have basically in my view will only be solved by attending appropriate live concerts. The only issue there is, how does one get the crowd to shut up so you can focus on the music LOLOL... that when recorded, theres some issue in picking up different elements that happen to sound similar.
 

  I think the biological abilities of your hearing are only the prerequisite to listening to music. If there is nothing wrong, as in your case, then it's more an intellectual and educational thing that will let you explore and appreciate certain styles of music. Obviously if someone has a severe lack of sensitivity in higher frequencies, that person will have a hard time listening to violins.

 
How would you begin to pick up on breaking up different elements? There'd be variability in things which sound similar, due to how the sound was produced and recorded. I've noticed if you have 5 similar frequencies with a deviation of perhaps 5-10 Hz with uniform amplitude - its difficult to get em consistently right regardless of number of attempts. That adaptation that I was seeking gets thwarted by neural habituation. Brain says - "Hey you be listening to these similar noises for a while, I give up. They're all the same now." 
 

  I certainly think that you can, to an extent, train yourself to listen for audio quality; but if you can't hear certain frequencies I wouldn't think that you could "learn" to hear them.
 
There is some interesting research on early language development and discriminating between two sounds that are very close together. If your brain doesn't learn to discriminate the sounds at a young age, then you lose a window of opportunity and will never be able to discriminate them. That's one reason that learning to speak a new language without an accent is so difficult as an adult.
 
So, I think it's certainly possible that people who grew up listening to a certain kind of music from a very early age may hear things that others do not, and that may increase their enjoyment of that music.

THIS IS THE PROBLEM. You're a legend for so elegantly summing up what I was waffling on. I had to learn Vietnamese for 6 months for work, I know few languages, but they're due to my background (most of them are very closely related). But boy, polytonal languages proved the point. I can read and write this horrid language fluently, but my speaking and hearing skills with it are dead, buried and turned to compost. 

 

[dprimary]

Hearing is a natural ability, listening is a learned skill. Listening can go a long way in compensating as your hearing ability declines. This is how many recording engineers made great sounding recordings long after they lost everything above 12khz or lower. They listen for things most people don't notice. It comes from decades of listening. 

 

[watchnerd]

My wife has provably better top end hearing range than me, but her listening skills are pure crap.

 

[dprimary]

  My wife has provably better top end hearing range than me, but her listening skills are pure crap.

Same thing with my kids.  

 

[mmerrill99]

Hearing is a natural ability, listening is a learned skill. Listening can go a long way in compensating as your hearing ability declines. This is how many recording engineers made great sounding recordings long after they lost everything above 12khz or lower. They listen for things most people don't notice. It comes from decades of listening. 

It seems that the physical mechanisms of hearing exist at birth & are sending signals to the brain but the brain's ability to interpret those signals into meaningful auditory objects & scenes is a matter of learning & experience.

There are parts in the brain that are allocated for certain processing but if they aren't used in that way, they become reallocated for other functions - such is the plasticity of the brain. I don't know of examples of hearing but in sight there are examples of someone blind from birth who in adult life receives a cornea transplant & now the mechanisms of sight are fully functioning, i.e the correct signals are going to the brain from the eyes but the adult has lost the ability to interpret what he sees i.e to build a visual scene as we all do normally - shadows gte misinterpreted as objects, depth of field is wrong, etc This person still needs a guide dog to navigate the physical world even 10 years after the successful cornea transplant

Hearing & sight share so many characteristics at the processing level that I would imagine a large part of this also applies to hearing.

 

[mmerrill99]

The other important aspect that needs mentioning in this discussion is that attention/focus is a crucial part of hearing - we can be "deaf" to some aspects of the sound because we don't focus our attention there. A lot of the training of hearing audio quality is about being aware (or being made aware) of what aspects to listen for & focussing on these aspects when listening. Listening is an active process, not a passive one - we hear what we focus on - we don't hear all the aspects of the soundfield at the same time from moment-to-moment - that's why we can hear the same playback differently the second time, because we are listening to different aspects of its soundfield.

So, in the same way as I don't believe your discrimination of wines is biologically limited - it's usually a matter of motivation - I also think your discrimination of audio is a matter of motivation