ABSTRACT
Recently, attempts have been made to simulate the hearing of individuals through audio
recordings. Those responsible for creating these tapes have put them forth as reasonable
representations of the hearing of specific individuals. The tapes are manufactured on
the basis of an individual’s pure-tone audiogram, using electronic filtering of selected
speech phrases. To the incompletely educated observer, the premise behind preparation
of the tapes seems to make sense, and they even appear to be “scientifically” engineered.
Consequently, these extremely inaccurate tapes could easily mislead a listener. However,
closer scrutiny reveals that the tapes violate virtually all scientific guidelines and bear no
predictable relationship to reality. Understanding why these tapes do not present even a
reasonably valid approximation of the hearing abilities of the people on whose audiograms
they were based, requires a working familiarity with several complex issues in otology and
acoustics.
