Table of Contents
My Concern
It’s not well known but I have a speech processing issue. I have a really hard time deciphering audio for voice communication. It’s so bad I rely on sub titles to watch video content with speech as well as read lips in meat space when with others.
My problem works like this: my hearing is good (I hear noises just fine) but I cannot hear people speak in terms of words. That seems odd, correct. I know a human is talking at me but all I hear is the sound of their voice, not words. It’s like hearing a guitar in a song, it’s noise but not words (speech).
This problem is exacerbated by background noise of any form. A video game, voices, the sound of the ocean, anything will cause this issue of mine to worsen.
I also have had tinnitus since I was a small child. So long I cannot remember a time before it existed for me. Tinnitus is a kind of background noise and exacerbates my speech issue as well.
Historic Coping Skills
If you’ve met me before, you know I’m not all that young, this hasn’t been a ’thing’ (as far as you knew ;) ) and you’re probably surprised right now.
In meat space I make sure the people I talk to are facing me and I’m facing them and I read their lips. If the other person or people have their back to me, I cannot hear anything except on the rare occasion I can focus hard enough to process the speech. I’m deaf to speech in this situation by default now.
The separation of background and voice has been critical for me with phones, particularly cell phones. It’s also why I cannot handle audio books.
The fix for me for cell phones was ear pieces/buds to isolate the voice from the background for my brain. I also discovered my right ear is the one that can process voices, not the left for whatever reason. If I use an ear piece for voice audio on my phone I can [generally] hear the other person or people.
New Coping Skills
Over the years I’ve clearly developed and honed a number of coping skills. Unfortunately, I need a bit more help day to day at this point. I need to develop new methods that help me with speech, especially for my growing number of conference calls using full video and voice. I also play a game with others regularly which requires game audio and voice communications to be isolated for my speech processing needs.
A Fix
Thankfully Windows 10 has a way to address this need built into the operating system.
For my fix you can see the Split voice and game audio for details on how I improved my situation.