ENTERTAINMENT
Singer Ayumi Hamasaki says she has lost hearing in her left ear

She's wearing a set of personal wireless monitor earpieces - used by artists on stage to hear an individual mix of their music, for click tracks/ lip synching, etc. All performers can be provided with an individually tailored mix, controlled by the monitor engineer, depending on their role on stage. This is instead of using many monitor speakers at their feet, and ironically are supposed to reduce the on stage sound level, as the main speakers are always in front of the artists, and controlled by the FOH (Front Of House) engineer.

Japanese Madonna - no - that title belongs to Kumi Koda - whose on-stage fashions are around 3-4 years behind the real one.

 

where do you volunteer for that position?

I actually like her music, but beauty is in the eye of. Bogi may think he has a lock on artistic taste, but it's not so.

But I have to second, and third, the fact that continuous exposure to loud sounds will cause permenent hearing damage. The effect is subtle and cumulative. You don't realize you're doing it to yourself until the damage is done.

I have permenent tinitius in my left ear. I can hear it ringing as I type this. It will never go away. Turning up the sound so I can hear the conversation over the tinitius just makes it worse.

Small arms fire is really bad. Rock concerts aren't good. Loud industrial settings. Riding a motorcycle without hearing protection - the wind noise will get you. Hammering nails. All sorts of things that you don't think about while you're doing them.

Be warned. If you expose yourself to loud noises this will happen to you.

 

Re-read my post.
Like yourself, I would characterize myself as "mildly sympathetic" to her. Note I clearly state I am not a fan.
What I objected to was your childish attempt at humor based on her illness. If she had been diagnosed with treatable cancer would that also have been funny?
You need to bring your poor jokes up about ten notches "windy one".

 

Farty, there is a phenomena called the binaural addition of loudness. When you have two ears, you benefit from this effect. Your brain sort of "adds" both sounds and you get something like a 3 to 6 dB increase in the sound level you hear. That's 50 to 100% or a doubling. Not insignificant. Like the guy quoted above, she's going to have difficult hearing speech in areas with high ambient noise levels, like clubs, public events, some restaurants.

She will also lose the benefit of binaural cues that assist in localization. This is sort of like going from stereo to mono and then being asked to point to the speaker the guitar sound is coming from. She'll have difficulty doing it.

There are other effects, but you can see where I am going. This is a serious impairment and her condition shouldn't be mocked. A little sympathy is warranted.

 

Interesting info-- where did it come from?

 

I've repeatedly posted that I am mildly sympathetic, but that I consider others overly sensitive to a relatively minor condition afflicting a girl whom the entire country would swap places with in a second, even if she has impaired hearing. Since she is such a lousy, screachy singer, the odd gag on this thread was inevitable.

Ayu is one of the richest and most fortunate people on the planet, and I'll reserve greater sympathy for the entire third world for example, than for Ayu's ear.

 

You really are way too sensitive sometimes. If you can't see the cheap gag connection between awful and extremely loud J-pop singers and deafness, you need to chill out a bit. It's fair enough to point out that this is serious for her, but it's not even stopping her from touring. She's still way more fortunate than most of the world will ever dream of being. She's young, beautiful and extremely wealthy, but she ain't much of a singer, and I'll reserve greater sympathy for those less fortunate than me, not vice versa.

 

"The American political radio host, Rush Limbaugh, lost all hearing in both his ears due to abusing the drug, Oxycotin"
Nonsense. That is nothing but a bad joke. Oxycontin can't make you deaf and Limbaugh is still on the air.

 

But it's in her left ear.... ???? And that shot is from the year just ended's 紅白 (kouhaku), after she was diagnosed.

 

I'm very much a fan of Ayumi's music and hope she continues to create wonderful things. I also hope that news like this brings an increased awareness of this kind of injury in audio-intensive jobs like music or industry and awareness how the ear works (and fails to work).

I've been listening to headphones and earphones nearly daily for hours at a time virtually all my life and have no hearing impairments. But too when I was a little kid I got lots of advice from adults and those in the medical and radio/telecommunications community about headphones and how to use (and how not to use) them. One can use headphones and earphones for an entire lifetime without destroying hearing by understanding the logarithmic and spectral nature of audio amplitude, the nature of the inner ear, and how to understand amplitude and frequency's effects on the ears. Hearing damage usually comes from excessive sound/air pressure on the eardrum (and overdeviation/tearing/scarring of the eardrum) and repetitive motion and hydrodynamic trauma to the inner ear. Most of my experience and training is with radio operations, but the same rules hold for entertainers or anyone in audio intensive environments, and the rules are fairly common sense: (1) always have transducers (audio generating elements) which are spectrally balanced and have cushioning air gaps and are unsealable (those ear buds are bottling pressure in the ear canal with low frequencies at 10db when high frequencies are well over 100db! Most people don't realize that if you can hear high-frequency "leakage" from earbuds ten feet away, imagine what it's doing to the ear (and bones, cochlea, and eardrum's skin attachments) in which it's inserted! The wearers/users usually don't realize the damaging amplitudes are even there until it's too late and the scarring and traumatic wear start to affect lower frequency resolution. Never use a earphone or headphone that has leaks any range in order to be heard fully.), (2) always inheirently check hearing as deafness by overuse is very gradual (check with tone generators, you can roughly do this with a PC's sound functions--an audiologist can be more precise), (3) keep the volume as low as possible and still get *most* of the sound (don't be greedy about sound--earphones and headphones cannot fully and accurately reproduce sound, don't expect, demand, or force them to try (as many newly hearing impaired will attest--if you push them, they will push back!)), (4) ears can wear out if overused, make sure there is time for them to hear nothing (all ears have some tinnitus by nature, be in a place much of the time that is quiet enough to listen the very quiet "ring" from your ears--I use mine as a high-frequency reference tone of sorts--it's quieter any other "sound" I can hear). Also, in telecommunications usage (voice communications) where one listens for a tens of hours at a time, listen only loud enough to just essentially recognize the words and avoid coneless emitters/speakers (don't use piezo or anything which can create high rates of changes in sound pressure).

Also, there are treatments for those with inner-ear damage, but unfortunately we are still deeply in the stone age regarding cochlear implants, inner-ear mechanical and neuroprosthetics, and audition restoration theories and methods generally. I hope one day the medical and prosthetics can serve Ayumi.

I could write a book (and I've read a few) on this. I wish Ayumi the very best and feel sorry for her loss.

 

Great post!

 

Those ear monitors come in pairs - and usually fit over the ear lobes. Using just one is difficult, the difference in weight on your ears can subtly affect your balance on stage.

Singers move and dance on stage, not just sing....

 

You can get much of this information from textbooks or technical papers on the subject of binaural hearing or human acoustics. I can't think of title at the moment, but some keywords for a search would be: lateralization, localization, interaural time or level delay or just "binaural".

A text that covers some of this subject is Cochlear Hearing Loss by Brian Moore.

The subject of binaural hearing is also covered in technical papers and text books on hearing aids and cochlear implants, because they need to address these issues when trying to restore normal hearing as best as possible. This is especially true of cochlear implants, because a choice needs to be made whether to install one or two implants. If you install two implants you destroy whatever residual hearing is left in both ears. If you install only one, you run up against similar problems like Ayumi with the loss of binaural hearing (depending on how good the other ear is), only worse, because an implant doesn't come close to matching a real ear in dynamic range, frequency resolution, time response to incoming sound and speech, signal to noise ratio, etc. Anyway, hope that helps. It's not my field, just a side interest.

Farty, no problem, I shouldn't have ridden you on this like I did.

 

Part of my work here in Tokyo is vocal mentoring top Japanese singers. My opinion is that she has ever been what I would call a good singer and I have to say that seeing her on the Christmas show on TV, the "writing was on the wall". She is on the way down (her sales are down and Koda Kumi's is up) and her pitch was atrocious. I would be more inclined to think she needed to save face someway provided and this is what her/they (her or the record company or both) as a face-saver. Also who says she rich? I would say that Avex is rich from her millions of CD sales but do we have any facts that prove she is rich. BTW, I love conspiracies.

 

... I still wonder if there is somebody to blame for this. I mean, sound engineers handling that equipment and dumping a level which makes deaf seem a bit ... uninformed at least.