Distortion of sound and distorted hearing

Distorted hearing can be a major problem for deaf people. They may, for example, 'hear', in that they register that someone is speaking, but the words don't make sense: speech seems jumbled together rather as if it were a foreign language.

Wonderful as digital hearing aids can be, they don't, in my experience, seem to be able to handle true distortion - although they can usually handle most pitch and volume problems which can appear to have the same symptoms.

Unfortunately true distortion just has to be lived with. So people with distorted hearing need the support of those around them. To give this support meaningfully, it helps to understand what distorted hearing is like. To find out, read on.

How to understand what distorted hearing is like

How to help For anyone with distortion hearing problems, it is difficult enough to make sense of speech without having to cope with badly formed, slurred or mumbled words. To help such people live with more comfortably with the problem: You need to make an effort to speak particularly clearly. This means separating words. Speaking slowly is not the same. Separating words seems to stress their beginning and ends which makes them sound clearer.

There are a number of ways to demonstrate distorted hearing to people who don't experience it. The point could be made more strongly by conducting some live demonstrations, but most people will understand from experience what the demonstrations would sound like.

• Tune a radio to people speaking and turn up the volume control so that the speech can be heard in another room. Then go into the other room and shut the doors. It will probably still be possible to hear that people are speaking but not properly to interpret their words because the sound will have been changed by passage through the walls. This muffling of sound is how many deaf people hear all the time because parts of their ears are damaged.

• Tune the radio to someone talking and then adjust it so that it is increasingly out of tune. Some of the sounds are coming through properly but some are not, and the result is distortion of the original sound.

• Tune the radio to someone talking and turn it up to maximum volume. (This demonstration works best with a cheap radio.) Then move away so that loudness isn't painful. If the volume is greater than the radio was designed to handle, there should be an 'overload' which distorts some of the sounds.