Can you hear me now?

I started by recording some sine waves, starting at 13 KHz and working my way up to 22 KHz in 1 KHz steps, with a modulation frequency of 10 Hz, and a duration of 2 seconds, with silent intervals of 2 seconds between waves. I recorded one for my left ear [the one that took the brunt of the exploding tire noise] and one for the right.

tones_left.mp3
tones_right.mp3

The fourth and last sine waves sounded kinda funny but after recording them twice and they came out the same way, well I guess it would have to do. Then I played them back on Winamp multiple times for each ear, deceasing the sound by 10% each time from 100% down to 10%. I was going to graph the results for comparison, but the results weren't really worth graphing.

First of all, the sound was a lot louder overall for my right ear than for my left. As I decreased the sound for my left ear, I heard all the tones relatively fine until about 40%, when I stopped hearing the tones after the sixth, yet I managed to hear the tenth! And I couldn't hear the first tone, which is very strange because that one always sounds the loudest of the bunch! Weird, I thought it would be a straight dropoff once you got above a certain frequency. Maybe my methodology is messed up though. LOL, yeah right! Anyway, at 30% I had roughly the same result except I couldn't make out the last wave like I could at 40%. At 20%, zilch, couldn't hear a damn thing. One of the problems with my recordings was that there is an audible click at the begining of some tones, which kind of gives away when a tone starts. I tried to get rid of these clicks with some filters but it didn't help much. Maybe I should persue that further. I could also try some different waves, rather than just sine waves.

I then tried the same experiment for my right ear. Not much to say. It was very loud at 100% and I heard everything fine until 30%. At 30%, I began to have a hard time hearing tone 4, one of the weird sounding ones, although I could still hear everything else. At 20%, I had problems with 4 again, as well as tone 8. At 10%, I made out the first three and the last three, but nothing in between. Just for kicks, I tried listening at 1%, but no dice, I couldn't make out anything.

So what did I learn from my little experiment? Not much, except that my left ear is messed up from that freaking noise while my right appears relatively unscathed. But I knew that already dammit! I will try this again over the weekend to see if my left ear makes any improvement. Hopefully it will eventually get close to being the same as my right. I might just flip the headphones around to test different ears rather than using seperate mp3's.

Useless details: I recorded the sounds using Adobe Audition, which was also used to generate the sine waves. My motherboard's onboard sound was used for playback, the usual Cmedia POS. My computer is hooked up to my old Sony receiver, an STR-AV650. Played back tones using an old pair of AKG "Silver"s, K-141. Sound was set to 100% in the OS [Win2K] and 50% on the receiver. The receiver puts out an earth-shattering 90 fucking-watts-per-channel at 8 ohmahas, but I guess that really doesn't matter as I was using the headphone jack. See, I told you this info was useless.

Posted by Fungii at June 10, 2005 08:39 PM |