Unintended Aural Consequences of MP3 Compression 670
zenst writes "A rather interesting read about possible damage to your hearing due to the way most audio compression techneques work. They mainly work by presenting a signal that the brain perceives to be the same as the original and it is this assumption that could effect our hearing and the way we hear."
Wonder if same true for Ogg as well (Score:1, Insightful)
Loses all credibility right here. (Score:3, Insightful)
speculation (Score:4, Insightful)
This is FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
The crux of his argument is that because the psychoacoustic model of hearing allows us to remove some frequencies, the ear will no longer calibrate itself correctly for "real" sounds. Wild conjecture, with no backup. Then he grumbles a little bit about his games using lossy codecs, and finally blames his own tinnitus on these games.
A bit of a loose argument, I have to say.
Re:Loses all credibility right here. (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you think my parent's generation went all deaf because they were glued to A.M. radio, which distorted and dropped frequency ranges?
Lovely logic... (Score:5, Insightful)
This guy seemed intelligent all the way up to the point where he wrote that particular line. If it only took that little of exposure to lossy sound caused him to have tinitus, then why aren't people by the millions complaining of hearing problems? I'm quite surprised he'd attribute his hearing problems to his hypothesis. I think it is far more likely there are other causes of his problems.
I also don't think, from what I've read here, that we're in any real danger of suffering noticable hearing damage from MP3s. The the main reason is that we don't listen to just MP3s 24 hours a day. Not even close! We'll be surrounded by compressed sound for years to come, but it'll never replace the natural every day sounds we hear all the time. Right now, as I write this, I can hear things happening all around me that definitely are not digital. As long as that noise is there, I can't imagine that our brain would focus in on the compressed sound itself.
It's an interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't hold up against real world data.
Peer Review -- scientific journals (Score:2, Insightful)
YESTERDAY: eggs make you live 20 extra years--eat a lot
TODAY: eggs will kill you
TOMORROW: eggs will make you live 30 extra years--eat a lot.
Ha. Medical science.
Re:This is FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
From what he says, the only way that MP3s could damage hearing is if ONLY that type of compressed data could be heard at all times. As long as there are other things to hear (like the world outside of your headphones...) then there's no reason for the ear not to calibrate itself.
It's kind of like saying that apples are dangerous. Your stomach digests apples in a different way than when it digests meat. Eventually, the body will get used to digesting apples and not remember how to eat meat. So, when you finally do eat meat, your body will not know how to digest it. I don't eat apples very often. One day, I ate an apple and then I ate meat, and I had an upset stomach.
Persistence of Vision (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, television, movies, and computer monitors are based on persistence of vision-- the idea that the eye and brain can be fooled into perceiving motion if the pictures are switched fast enough (in the case of NTSC TV, 30 frames per second). This is a significant "compression" of the data, far larger than the amount of data being thrown out by psychoacoustic compression. NASA uses cameras that record 10,000 fps to examine explosions and things of that nature that occur far too fast for us to perceive.
Reality occurs at a rate that technology currently finds impossible to record in full. That doesn't mean it's damaging us.
Sadly, your assessment is not entirely unwarranted (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, given a critical evaluation of the text itself, dismissal is a good guess. There are a lot of red flags there, especially at the end. Certainly, it's not clear to me what calibratory function the signals otherwise masked by psychoacoustic (or neuroacoustic, as the author says) compression might serve - this is the most important part of the theory, and there's no real attempt by the author to treat it in detail. But (self-consciously) little sketches like this, many of which by students with even less coherence or credibiliy, are often a prelude to important discoveries, good and bad.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
wonder how much... (Score:3, Insightful)
how about if the original signal was just totally poor quality (think cassette tapes). would this damage hearing also?
lame lame lame excuse for quality publishing.
Not very much.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow.... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is just ridiculous bull crap. So is the brief mention of "subliminal messages". Normally, I would elaborate further and explain, but on this I think not. Anyone stupid enough to not immediately realize that this is bullshit is beyond reason anyways.
downhill (Score:3, Insightful)
I stopped reading after he started going on about dictators slipping propaganda into the inaudible cracks in your media.
And it started off with such promising analysis! I bet the slashdot moderators didn't read to the bottom of the article before approving it.
Re:Sadly, your assessment is not entirely unwarran (Score:5, Insightful)
Please tell me this is sarcasm.
This guy did little more than quote a college biology book, and scan the pictures to create a web site. On first reading the article I thought to myself, "funny, it doesn't feel like April first."
Also, even if we give this guy the benefit of doubt for a moment, there is still nothing to worry about. When was the last time you listened to MP3's and/or video games in a completely soundless environment for an extended period of time? Last few times I did it, I was at home with the refidgerator humming away, a few computer fans whirring, my chair creaking occasionally, simply put, I had lots of background noise for my ears to filter out, without my speakers adding to it. Sure, I would love to put a sensory depravation tank around my computer when playing Thief, it can really blow yuor concentration when your roomate bursts out in laughter 3 feet away from you while reading his email. But, I don't have one, and so am bombarded with small, often inaudiable sounds.
If I were a betting man, I would confidently bet you were right. But just the same, I hope a few members of the medical community (I think this would take a background in neurolobiology/cog. sci/audiology) see this, and at least consider it. You could probably devise a relatively inexpensive animal study or two that could safely close off this kind of speculation.
There are far better things for that money to be spent researching. Don't waste it on junk like this.
Re:Analogy to vision.. (Score:2, Insightful)
One only has to scroll to the end of the article to see what pseudo-religion this person is pushing:
(teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!)
Drag the RIAA Into It... (Score:3, Insightful)
While reading this story, ironically enough, I played an MP3 I had downloaded from Gnucleus (a Gnutella client) using a multi-host download. One of the hosts seems to have been one of the RIAA servers that sends out static; for a few seconds in the middle of the song, there's this horrible (loud) clicking and popping. I have no desire to be the one to try it, but how cool would it be if I sued them for damage to my ears (when listening to the MP3 I downloaded from them) and won. It's actually not as ridiculous as it might sound -- if I steal a candy bar, and it turns out to have cyanide and razor blades in it, I'm almost positive that I could still sue / file criminal charges -- you can't 'booby trap' things if they cause injury.
As I said, it's a stretch, but I'd love to see the RIAA ordered to pay a tremendous fine for causing hearing loss / damage to speakers.
Re:Loses all credibility right here. (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, I think he was saying that digital audio can cause the ear to "go out of tune". On that note (no pun intended, I swear), I think he's kind of full of crap...of all the sounds that we are exposed to every day, digital audio probably makes up way less than 5%, if that. I can't imagine that it would make a significant difference one way or the other.
On top of that, he really presents no evidence one way or the other about this theory. At least he acknowledges it's only a hypothesis. Perhaps some research will be done on this in the future.
Re:Tinnitus (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, are you so sure about that? It is entirely possible that our eyes require very similar forms of calibration, but that we have not even theorized the existence(sp?) of such a problem b/c we don't spend nearly as much time watching lossily encoded images as we spend listening to lossily encoded sounds. Is it possible that a form of this could partially account for eye-strain from staring at a monitor for hours on end? (I personally don't suffer from it, but I know many people who do) Something like this would be worth investigation...
Re:Analogy to vision.. (Score:2, Insightful)
While I understand his point, as you say if it were true, it should equally cause permanent vision loss from watching TV or even a pixelated medium like a computer screen or 4-colour photos in the newspaper.
IOW, if what you don't hear causes hearing loss due to futzing with the brain's calibration mechanism, then what you don't see should cause vision loss for the same reason. It doesn't wash.
Re:Tinnitus (Score:5, Insightful)
I listen to headphones at resonable volumes, I don't work in industries which have hearing-loss danger, and I don't go to bars or concerts or other loud events very often. My hearing is still great. But this low tinnitus only when its completely and utterly quiet.
So to respond to the original article: Do you drink cola drinks? Coffee? Try quitting caffeine and maybe your tinnitus will go away. And you can still listen to mp3s.
PS: If you read medical sites and other tinnitus support sites, they all say that caffeine aggrivates tinnitus because it constricts blood vessels in the ear. Quit caffine!!
It's pointless anyways... (Score:1, Insightful)
Plus, when I listen to MP3's (computer plugged to hi-fi speakers) the sound echoes everywhere, produce some vibrations on wooden furniture... I guess this produces just enough "real", distorted signals for my ear to "recalibrate"?
What IS making me deaf, indeed, is the stupid 12-cm fan in the stupid Powermacintosh G4...
Re:Tinnitus (Score:4, Insightful)
He says
I read it, and I don't buy a word of it. The grammar is faulty. Lay+out is make-believe at most. Pictures are from some first anatomy book. No references, just some weird hypothesis withou any proofs. Sounds like a hoax if I ever saw one.
Besides he even fails to mention most Fourier transform based codecs work. They do not even fullfill the persumptions of his hypothesis, because their main size reductions are based on sliced away frequencies outside the scope of our hearing.