Hi everyone, my case is quite special… I suffer misophonia as long as I can remember and believe it or not, my work and passion is Audio engineering. I’ve have been working professionally in this field for more than 25 years now. I serve as the Vice president of the LATAM region for the Audio Engineering Society, and… get myself working in the last 2 or 3 years in a way of coping with my disorder.
After experimenting and designing several approaches to this, I came up with a brief for a “prothesis” I designed which is giving me great results so far.
1) prothesis should not prevent from hearing everyone else talking nor harm substantially word inteligibility (people you are dealing with, should not feel you are blocking them away, after all, we want to be sociable…)
2) prothesis should be as unostructive as possible (people you are dealing with, should not feel you are wearing something strange) visually and audibly prothesis should not be “seen, as such and should not be heard by others if it emits sound” (after all we are trying to be included in a dinner table…)
3) prothesis should not harm your hearing (i’ve been proposed some “sound therapy” that would raise my threshold of hearing in some freqs (aka loosing sensitivity in some frequencies, associated with my triggers) wich is not acceptable, specially to me because of my work.
after trying to block, filter, shape the sound so the attack portion of sounds are smoothed out (my main triggers are fast attack, fast decay, fast release, high pitched sound (above 3KHz), generated by humans, mostly eating, chewing, etc. (the regular stuff, but some others too) I REALISED THAT THE BEST WAY TO GO IS MASKING.
for doing that, I designed several noises, based originally in white and nature sounds, high passed it from 3Khz, modulate in pitch and level, it in order to avoid psichoacustically brain adaptation to noise, and noise shaping it usign FIR and IIR filters in order to “DITHER” my ears.
these noises are in a app in my iphone and I am currently testing very promising blutooth bone conducting headphones, even some that are actual lenses, so they are really unobstrusive and my ears are fully opened to the environement.
I’m on my 3rd month testing and THIS IS REALLY WORKING
I DO hear the sounds that bother me, (some of the worst, my father chewing and slurping…) but they don’t trigger me while hearing the noise!
I’d like to find fellow misophonic people around me (montevideo Uruguay) in order to include them in a protocol for pursuing this research and fine tuning what I believe may be a shareable solution to many.
anyone in this forum nearby montevideo, Uruguay?