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Weird hearing

Author: David Spiegelthal ★2017
Date: 2007-01-04 03:09

I've been having some strange stuff going on with my hearing and was wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar.

Synopsis: I've been fighting an inner ear infection in my left ear for about two weeks now. My left eustachian tube is completely blocked and the hearing on my left side is very muffled, with a constant ringing (tinnitis).

A couple of days ago I was trying to help my daughter tune her violin, and even with a tuner right in front of me, I couldn't get the thing to sound right. Then last night, I was listening to various music tapes through headphones and noticed that (a) the orchestras all sounded horribly out of tune, and (b) they were not playing together! Very strange, as these were top orchestras and I had listened to these same recordings many times and never noticed such problems!

Did some further listening experiments, and discovered a very weird phenomenon -- not only are the volume and frequency response of my left ear degraded from the infection, but I'm hearing sounds both delayed in time and displaced in frequency by about a quarter tone (or maybe less)! I didn't think it was possible for the ear to alter the frequency of incoming sound and add a time delay, but it's definitely happening to me. For example, a perfectly tuned grand piano right now sounds to me like the worst little out-of-tune bar piano you've ever heard. And what sounded to me like the recorded orchestra not playing together was in fact the left channel sound being slightly time-delayed compared to the right channel!

I'm a bit concerned about this, especially as I'm about to run out of the antibiotics prescribed by my doc and clearly my ear is still far from back to normal (I'm going back to see him within the next few days). But as a scientific observation, I find this odd phenomenon fascinating, and I'm hoping someone might have some knowledge of what I'm experiencing.

Anyone else heard of "EchoPlex-Flanger Ear Syndrome" (for lack of a better name)?

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Weird hearing new

David Spiegelthal

2007-01-04 03:09