Are my ears EQ'ed differently?

[ilazir]

I have no idea which forum is best for this.

When I was recently using a Q-tip to clear my ears, I noticed that my left ear seemed to perceive the sound the Q-tip made as higher frequencies, and my right ear as lower. This also happens when I cup my ears (like listening to a seashell).

Do my ears hear differently? Should this affect how I work with music in any way?

Thanks for considering a totally random question.

[ddwhitney]

Yes, an often overlooked component in my opinion.

Each person has a unique frequency response based on a number physiological variances and associated psychology. No two people hear the exact same thing from the same source material.

It shouldn't effect how you work with music because everyone has the same issue and learn the same way to compensate unless there are serious problems with certain frequencies like a huge dip at 2k.

[Carl Kolchak]

This is totally normal, and will continue to be exacerbated throughout your lifetime, as you ears will rarely be exposed completely equally to harmful sounds for example.

It's not only most peoples hearing that does not perfectly correlate from birth, but most peoples eye sight too.

Try looking at lush grass or a blue sky, covering one eye, then the other.

You will probably notice that the hues have different vibrancies from one eye to the the other.

It's possible to be partially colour blind in one eye, but not the other - so it would make sense that one ear might have greater sensitivity to certain frequencies than the other, your brain combines the two "images", aural or visual, to give you the overall spatial impression / perception (that's so simplified it sounds like a morons guide to 3D movies ).

Now just be careful with those Q-tips!

Here's how your ears can save your life - regardless of Q-tip abuse!

[serio]

I can really tell that my ears hear differently when I flip my cans to the opposite ears, while listening to music with harder panning.

What does get frustrating is when I get a bad cold or sinus allergies and my ears stay stuffy for days and days. Sometimes one a lot more than the other.

[DonaldM]

Many things can affect the way you perceive sound. Some are physical, some are more psycho-acoustic. With what you described, a lot of things could have been in play. One ear may have had more wax in it than the other, thus changing the shape of the ear canal through which the sound waves must pass to reach your ear drum. You may have had some fluid in your middle ear cavity from congestion, and that will impede the motion of the ossicular chain that delivers the wave motion to your inner ear.

Other factors come into play as well. For example, if you were prone to ear infections as a young child, you may have some residual damage to one ear's mechanisms, such as a slight thickening on the tympanic membrane (your ear drum), especially if at one point you had a slight tearing due to excess fluid in your middle ear. This happens to a lot of kids.

And, as we get older, frequency response to wave motion input in the inner can change, usually with a slight loss to resolution of higher frequencies. One ear could be more affected than the other, especially if you have ever experienced some sort of acoustic trauma...a loud burst of sound, say...in one ear as opposed to the other.

The ear is a very intricate and sensitive mechanism, which converts disturbances in the air caused by the wave motion of sound from mechanical to electrical. Pretty impressive, too!

As a side note, other than cleaning the outer part of your ear, never stick anything IN your ear smaller than your elbow! Q-tips are a lousy way to try and remove wax build-up...all you succeed in doing is pushing the wax in further up the canal.

[AdamPT8]

I noticed this was the same with me and after a bit of research found out that naturally most peoples ears, on average, are unbalanced with better hearing on the left.

Why that is I don't know.

[solidwalnut]

Originally Posted by AdamPT8

I noticed this was the same with me and after a bit of research found out that naturally most peoples ears, on average, are unbalanced with better hearing on the left.

Why that is I don't know.

Interesting that you say 'left', that's the case with me. My right is good, but over-all more 'dull' in interpretting sound. And here I thought all along that was because I was 'stage left' during most of my playing days with the drummer crashing in my right ear. Who knows, that still may be the problem...

[sunburst79]

I suspect that this is why Humans and a lot of other animals cock their heads when they are trying to zero in on a particular sound.

[mcphoto]

When I was a teenager, I'd had some chronic ear infections and went to an ear doc to have my ears cleaned.

Man, what a TRIP that was - they vaccumed (literally) my ears out. Suddenly, it was like I'd kicked a treble boost up - way up. I could hear the hiss of AC vents, I could hear the air in a still room. And the doc said my ears were just "normally" waxy. Took a few days to really compensate.

You can get your ears tested by an ENT doctor and get a good idea of differences in perception.

(Now I'm picturing the fight club guys in that doctor's trash, looking for a big vat of... soap ingredients!)

[DonaldM]

mcphoto: Yes, when you have a thorough cleaning of the external ear canal that way, the high frequency sounds you've been missing are now getting through to your ear drum and it is like having the treble turned up on nature! That's because wax build-up tends to dampen the higher frequencies first. Remove that impedence and, WHAM, the whole world seems to be in high treble! Also, for a little while after treatment, your ear drum is just a wee bit sensitive from the cleaning process, and tends to be a bit more sensitive to higher frequencies and can thus amplify them a bit. After a couple of days though, it settles down and you begin to hear things in better balance.

On the other hand, for those who have a sensori-neural hearing issue,meaning it isn't wax or obstruction in the middle ear of any sort, but rather has to do with how the sensori neural system translates the mechanical signals entering the inner ear via the ossicular chain, then, unfortunately, higher frequencies tend to go first. It is not unusual as we get older to have a bit of loss, anywhere from 5-20% in frequencies of 6-8Khz and above. Most hearing aids are designed to provide gain to those higher frequencies to compensate for that loss.

Normally this isn't a real problem for everyday stuff. But for us musicians and engineers, it can be, if we're not aware of it. It really becomes an issue when there's noticeable loss below 4khz. Then it begins to affect how we hear speech. That's why your grand-dad kept saying "huh?"