Millions of Americans experience some degree of hearing loss. The Social Security Administration (SSA) operates programs that provide cash disability benefits to people with permanent impairments like hearing loss, if they can show that their impairments meet stringent SSA criteria and their earnings are below an SSA threshold. The National Research Council convened an expert committee at the request of the SSA to study the issues related to disability determination for people with hearing loss. This volume is the product of that study. Hearing Loss: Determining Eligibility for Social Security Benefits reviews current knowledge about hearing loss and its measurement and treatment, and provides an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the current processes and criteria. It recommends changes to strengthen the disability determination process and ensure its reliability and fairness. The book addresses criteria for selection of pure tone and speech tests, guidelines for test administration, testing of hearing in noise, special issues related to testing children, and the difficulty of predicting work capacity from clinical hearing test results. It should be useful to audiologists, otolaryngologists, disability advocates, and others who are concerned with people who have hearing loss.

Everyday your world is filled with a multitude of sounds. Sound can let you communicate with others or let others communicate with you. It can be a warning of danger or simply an enjoyable experience. Some sounds can be heard by dogs or other animals but cannot be heard by humans. The ability the hear is definitely an important sense, but people who are deaf are remarkable in the ways that they can compensate for their loss of hearing All of the sounds you can hear from plucking the strings above occur because mechanical energy produced by your computer speaker was transferred to your ear through the movement of atomic particles. Sound is a pressure disturbance that moves through a medium in the form of mechanical waves. When a force is exerted on an atom, it moves from its rest or equilibrium position and exerts a force on the adjacent particles. These adjacent particles are moved from their rest position and this continues throughout the medium. This transfer of energy from one particle to the next is how sound travels through a medium. The words "mechanical wave" are used to describe the distribution of energy through a medium by the transfer of energy from one particle to the next. Waves of sound energy move outward in all directions from the source. Your vocal chords and the strings on a guitar are both sources which vibrate to produce sound waves. Without energy, there would be no sound. Let's take a closer look at sound waves

SOUNDCHECK THE BASICS OF SOUND AND SOUND SYSTEMS

Ticking clocks, claps of thunder, the human voice—sound is anything that can be heard. Hearing sound is one thing, but understanding just how it works and what its properties are is quite another. Answering these questions and others concerning supersonic speed and breaking the sound barrier, how the human voice and ear work, and the age-old question of whether a tree falling in the forest unobserved makes any noise, this volume provides an accessible yet detailed and amply illustrated guide to the science of sound. Also included are several fun projects, which allow readers to explore in a hands-on way the nature, quality, and behavior of sound.

Sound Propagation Sound propagates through air as a longitudinal wave. The speed of sound is determined by the properties of the air, and not by the frequency or amplitude of the sound. Sound waves, as well as most other types of waves, can be described in terms of the following basic wave phenomena.

This book presents a clear and precise treatment of the physics of sound while using a level of math suitable for readers in the speech, language, hearing and health sciences. Simple mathematics, graphics, and qualitative descriptions are demonstrated to explain wave concepts, spectrograms, intensity, and decibels.

A practitioner's guide to the basic principles of creating sound effects using easily accessed free software. Designing Sound teaches students and professional sound designers to understand and create sound effects starting from nothing. Its thesis is that any sound can be generated from first principles, guided by analysis and synthesis. The text takes a practitioner's perspective, exploring the basic principles of making ordinary, everyday sounds using an easily accessed free software. Readers use the Pure Data (Pd) language to construct sound objects, which are more flexible and useful than recordings. Sound is considered as a process, rather than as data—an approach sometimes known as “procedural audio.” Procedural sound is a living sound effect that can run as computer code and be changed in real time according to unpredictable events. Applications include video games, film, animation, and media in which sound is part of an interactive process. The book takes a practical, systematic approach to the subject, teaching by example and providing background information that offers a firm theoretical context for its pragmatic stance. [Many of the examples follow a pattern, beginning with a discussion of the nature and physics of a sound, proceeding through the development of models and the implementation of examples, to the final step of producing a Pure Data program for the desired sound. Different synthesis methods are discussed, analyzed, and refined throughout.] After mastering the techniques presented in Designing Sound, students will be able to build their own sound objects for use in interactive applications and other projects