Another note on audio discrepancy

If my videos are an issue at all volumes, you may also have hearing loss.

While I work on normalizing the audio for future videos and especially problematic past videos on my end - sometimes, it’s bad even for me - I wanted to make a comment that may apply to some of my readers.

If you have difficulty hearing my voice on these videos, even if the volume is turned up loud enough that what I am reacting to is too loud, and you have not gotten a hearing test recently (past 5 years), please consider getting a hearing test. The thing with hearing loss is that even if you cannot hear anything until 80 decibels, an 85 decibel noise is still going to sound too loud! "Loud is still loud.” This is due to the fact that we have different kinds of cilia - sound-sensitive hair cells - in our ear, and they are specialized for both different pitches as well as different volumes.

Hearing loss is also rarely uniform across pitches. Noise related hearing loss especially will take out your high frequency hearing first, due to the shape of the cochlea. You get a situation with hearing loss where the person with hearing loss will perceive that you are mumbling, due to the fact that different speech sounds are different volumes and pitches inherently (compare “t” versus “m”) and so a patient experiencing hearing loss will tell you to speak up, speak up, speak up, until you get loud enough to be heard. Then they will ask you why you are shouting at them! And they’re not wrong: you are shouting at them.

A simple hearing test takes about 15 minutes and we can tell from the result what the likely cause of hte hearing loss was (noise, otosclerosis, etc.) and whether a referral to an audiologist is necessary, such as if there are any red flags for a more serious and/or a treatable cause of hearing loss. As a speech pathologist, I received graduate level training in audiology and aural rehabilitation from a Doctor of Audiology, who was amazing. She even managed to get through to ME!