I managed to do some auditory training with my CI alone this weekend even with attending a conference in Eugene on Friday and Saturday.  Fortunately Debbie and I were able to get out of town right before the U of O homecoming game ended yesterday! 

I enjoyed most of the sessions I attended at the conference.  One presenter, Carol Flexer, is a well-known pediatric audiologist who gave a very compelling talk about how we need to look at providing auditory/language experiences for our students from a new perspective considering the technological advances that have been made for people with hearing losses.  One of Carol’s comments that was of personal interest to me is that there are studies being done analyzing the advantages of wearing a cochlear implant and a hearing aid.  Preliminary findings show that wearing one of each makes for better music appreciation.  Makes sense to me considering that cochlear implants don’t go below 250 Hz (middle C).  For you techies, here’s an article that explains this limitation of CIs. 

Another session I attended discussed a very new (to me) concept of transposition hearing aids for people with sloping hearing losses (good hearing in low frequencies that slope sharply to very poor hearing in the higher frequencies).  Apparently there’s a way to “transpose” hearing in the lower frequencies and use that to amplify the higher frequencies.  I’m flabbergasted on how that can be done.  It doesn’t sound like that I have enough hearing in the low frequencies to benefit from this technology, but who knows, perhaps at some point I will.

I'll get to the reason for my title of today's entry.  Today I wore just my CI for the most part.  The things that I did today that made interesting sounds to me are:  clipping my fingernails and toenails, dicing celery (sounded crunchy like you were eating them!), and throwing things in the garbage.  I did wear my hearing aid too when Simon was playing his tuba and heard a funny sound—water sloshing in the tuba while a very bad sounding note was being played!  As soon as I heard that I knew right away why it sounded that way, and my suspicion was confirmed when Simon emptied the water out right afterwards.

Today I did some “formal” auditory training.  I listened (reading along with the book) to two chapters of a romance novel that I had loaded on my MP3 player and only had to find my place with the help of my hearing aid once!  The narrator was very easy to follow.  I decided to go with an easier-to-read novel as the other two books that I was reading required too much thought in order to process the information.  I’ll try to do my listening exercises more consistently by doing at least one chapter a day…

Thanks to those of you that mentioned my broken links that were throughout my blog.  I went back and fixed them all.