Do you have sensitive hearing?

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Please stop talking about me.

O wait, I'm just paranoid.

I have very sensitive hearing. I can hear a lot that others cannot, like the sounds of people breathing when I enter a room, high pitched or quiet noises created by electronics, etc. Many things are way too loud; my mom speaks too loud pretty much 100% of the time, and she talks fast; while I have no problem with the fast talking, often hearing her voice too much makes me want to hide. And she loves to talk a lot.

My last ex was totally blind, and she had really sensitive hearing; we noticed her hearing was better than mine, but not by a whole ton; not like it was compared to most people. The main difference, though, was more in interpretation of information - we both found ourselves to like pretty much the same volume levels, and find pretty much the same ones annoying.

Another thing is when I hear a note being played, I know which note it is, and I know which chords I'm hearing when I hear most chords. I also do this with things that aren't instruments, like cars, refridgerators, people's talking voices, etc. Anything that makes noise pretty much.

sounds like you have at least perfect pitch, which you will find as you age, that it will turn around and bite you, because your cochlea shrinks with age and as it does that, your sense of pitch skews upwards, and everything starts sounding at least a chromatic tone sharp. it happened to me, that is what the audiologist said. it is a pain.

I've suspected as much, and been told/asked if I had perfect pitch in the past, but don't tell people I have perfect pitch because when I say it to people I feel like I'm bragging and I hate bragging, especially for something I did not have to work hard on; I am VERY modest. Same reason I only say "bass and piano" when people ask me what I play.

I have a few questions for you:
1. Around which age range does this cochlear shrinking begin to have noticeable impacts?
2. Do you know if it happens universally? Might it not be as bad for some as for others; or the flipside - might it be much worse for some than for others?
3. Do you have any links or documentation or anything you could show me that would give me further information on this?

This is the first time I've heard of cochlear shrinking at all - let alone its effects on people with perfect pitch. I'm not doubting you or anything - I simply desire more information.

i didn't notice it until i was in my late 30s, but it started out at a half [chromatic] tone divergence between correct and my warped sensation of correct tone which invariably was sharper than the correct tone. 2 decades later, that has deteriorated to a whole tone sharp, so i have had to get into the habit of doing a rapid mental downward recalculation of the note's actual pitch. what this means in real life, is that i hear a D when it is actually a C, so i have to tell myself that although it sounds sharp as a D that it is actually a C, as a standard downward shift. i miss the immediacy of note identification that i used to have. actually i miss lots of things of my youth but for some reason, even though i'm not a musician i still miss this acutely. it is akin to losing one's sense of depth perception, with one having to laboriously calculate estimated distance of objects relative to one another. i can't speak for anybody else, but from what i read it is similar for others, and widespread. this is why i mentioned it as a friendly caution to a fellow perfect pitch person.

there isn't much written about it- further on in this reply i will include a link which talks more about pitch perception in general.

hard to find good info on the web, but this [below] is a start-

Absolute pitch can shift with age, and this has often been a problem for older musicians.
Marc Damashek, a piano tuner, wrote to me about such a problem:
"When I was four, my older sister discovered that I had perfect pitch—could
instantly identify any note across the keyboard without looking....I’ve been surprised
(arid disturbed) to find that my perceived piano pitch has shifted upwards by
perhaps 150 cents (a semitone and a half). . . .Now when I hear a recorded piece or
a live performance, my best guess at what note is being played is consistently,
absurdly high."
Damashek relates that he cannot easily compensate for this because “I’m always so
firmly convinced that the note I’m hearing is the one that I’ve always called by its correct
name: it still sounds like an F, damnit, but it's an E flat."
In general, as Patrick Baron [a musician and piano tuner] has written to me, "older
piano tuners tend to tune the highest treble octaves quite sharp and the last three or four
notes incredibly sharp (sometimes more than a semitone).... Perhaps there is some sort
of atrophy of the basilar membrane [another way of saying "cochlear shrinkage"] or a stiffening of the hair cells which causes this,
rather than a template shift."
Other conditions may cause a temporary or permanent shift of absolute pitch, including
strokes, head injuries and brain infections. One correspondent told me that his
absolute patch shifted a semitone dunng an attack of multiple sclerosis and remained
slightly off thereafter.


(clicky on this link to learn more about perfect pitch

I just read that article. I've read and heard very little about absolute pitch; that article gave me so many ideas for ways I can find out more, along with names of those that research it, which I like because I love having sources like those.

I also identified with it in so many ways. I was going to quote the things that I identified with the most, but I would have ended up quoting a huge percentage of the article. I'm pretty surprised to read things written out like that about it, especially since I have likened it to perceiving colors before, even though I don't perceive them as colors.

Reading it, I thought of so many experiences I have had that were similar to those in the article.

One, that happened recently, was at a band practice. We were just jamming, taking turns driving the song, i.e. improvising some melody, maybe soloing on the chords, whatever. For reference, I was playing my fretless J-Bass for this. At the start of the song I was playing with my E string tuned to D instead. At some point during the course of the song, while playing along, actually leading the direction of the song because I was changing my sound by playing one-handed, seamlessly, I tuned the E string back from D to E, using the tuning of the string as a part of what I was improvising. After the song, I was showing one of the guitarists how to play this one line, and I had to get close because my bass has no markers on the front of the neck, only on the side of it, so he couldn't tell from a distance what notes I was playing. He kept playing the part wrong, and then he stopped and said "wait, are you in drop D?" and I said "no, I tuned it back to E" to which he responded "when did you tune back to E?" I told him that I did it in the middle of the song, at which point he just looked at me, I suppose with a surprised face although I'm not sure, and was like "wait, what? how?" and I just kind of laughed and shrugged, a sort of "dunno, I just did" gesture. The percussionist, who has known me for many years and seen me do similar, just looked at the guitarist and nodded with his eyebrows raised.

There are many other similar examples. One that happens all the time at the annoyance of bandmates (although with no actual grief - we are very chill, very relaxed - when this happens we usually all laugh) is me stopping a jam because someone is -slightly- out of tune.

Another one that happens often, is everyone will think a song sounds good, except for me, because the song just sounds unpleasant to me in some way - like it just being ugly, stupid, childish, arrogant, sometimes it is just unpleasant and I can't say why, I just hate the sound. Yet everyone else will hear it and say it sounds great. Sometimes, I offer some alternate variation on the song, sometimes just a chord change, sometimes just transposing to another key, other times doing one type of chord over another. Sometimes they like it, other times we go with the other way, which I am fine with, as long as they think it sounds good.

One thing that happens with me, which I did not see in the article, is how I perceive songs differently, assuming the songs are in stereo, if I do not have the right and left earphones to the correct ears. It sounds so different to me; it totally changes the feel of a song. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don't. I often try this out just to see what it will do to a song.

I hate load noises which is some what funny becasue I can listen to metal just fine. But most ever thing else a lot of things hurt my ears.

I don’t have sensitive hearing for small/quiet/high pitched things but I do find some loud noises very uncomfortable like vacuum cleaners, being near a piano being played, cinema for the first ten minutes or so then I seem to adjust to it, and concerts or musical theatre etc.

I have hyperacusia (the technical name for abnormal acuteness of hearing due to increased irritability of the sensory neural mechanism; characterized by intolerance for ordinary sound levels) and I always thought this was just one more symptom of hypersensitivity (to lights, scents, touch, atmospheric air pressure, heat, cold, etc) condition during migraines.

Yes my hearing is sensitive as loud voices tend to affect me.