alt Hacker NewsThere's something I think must be possible and wonder if it would be useful: using noise cancelling earphones to mimic someone else's hearing loss. The idea is if you live with someone with hearing loss, you could enter the frequencies they can't hear, and cancel only those. Then you could spend a day with these in to try to get a more direct understanding of which noises they can hear and which they can't.
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Whilst I have no idea how well this would work, I would definitely appreciate something like this.
Rather than noise cancelling headphones, I’d be happy with an audio recording that has my loss applied to it. Anything to demonstrate what it’s like would help awareness and understanding.
Pending that, there are a number of videos on YouTube that show simulated hearing loss, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewOpW-4XFqM
Cancelling aperiodic noise requires time travel to work, doesn’t it? So you could feel what it feels like to be that person on an airplane bare-headed, or next to a fan, or perhaps even beside a river, but beyond that I don’t think the technology is there.
As most later hearing loss starts from the high frequencies, like mine, it is enough to put a good amount of cotton whool in your ears. No kidding, this should simulate it pretty well.
just the fact you instinctively thought of the use case to understand and empathize with this disability better, is very cool of you
It makes no sense at all. You have measurable frequency range. But you have no idea how particular brain weights the specific frequencies in the range. Some people can live comfortable life hearing only 200 Hz to 6000 Hz from birth. The other people freak out hearing 8000 Hz coil whine sound. It’s not an universal thing.