it wouldn’t be called research.

The basics of human hearing

This post is just a stub to connect you to a YouTube video of a talk I presented to musicians about understanding human hearing. It covers human testing, tonal balance, and spatial hearing. It includes several demonstrations and it is intended to be useful to the general public. It does not assume any prior knowledge of how hearing works. I hope you find it interesting and enjoyable.

The talk is called Psychoacoustics for Performers and it is about 52 minutes long. It was recorded before a live audience on May 5, 2008 at the Switzerland Inn in Little Switzerland, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The talk was given during a three-day conference for musicians and DJ’s, one of a series of such conferences sponsored by Bose Corporation in support of users of its L1 Portable Line Array products. The recording was much improved by the editing efforts of Ken Jacob of Bose. During my talk, Ken also took the photo attached to this post.


3 responses to “The basics of human hearing”

  1. Christopher Ickler Avatar

    Addendum: one of my subscribers asked in email about hearing aids, possibly from Bose? Here is my reply.

    Over the counter hearing assistance devices have been evolving rapidly since the FDA approved them about 18 months ago [Sep 2022]. So I just went to Wirecutter and sure enough, they have an up to date review, led by Lauren Dragan, who really knows her stuff. And they did include two models by Lexie, who now licenses the Bose patents. Products will get even better once they get past the inevitable errors in “Gen 1”, which should happen soon. Also, Apple has some hearing assistance processing built into iPhone+EarPods and further enhancements are in the pipeline.

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  2. Eric Freeman Avatar
    Eric Freeman

    Thanks, Chris. I really enjoyed that! It’s hard to find good recorded lectures on psychoacoustics. The animated plot you shared seemed to create an aha moment for many in the audience. I’m going to share the YouTube video link with a bunch of folks at Bose.

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    1. Christopher Ickler Avatar

      Thanks, Eric—glad to be of service. I made the animated cartoon in the video to help people visualize a model that I attribute to Steven Colburn. It goes back as far as 1978 at least, but I read about it in the late 80’s, when I was preparing to work on Auditioner.

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