Hearing Health Summer 2015 Issue Summer 2015 | Page 19

hearing health

developing and teaching audio courses for the Schools
of Communication and Music. Eventually, life changes
(marriage and family) found me switching from full-time
engineering and part-time teaching, to full-time teaching
and part-time engineering. I secured a full-time faculty
position at Columbia College Chicago in 1993.
My interest and work in the hearing sciences began 15
years ago while studying for my master’s degree in music
technology at Northwestern. My adviser suggested I
take a course in hearing physiology with Jon Segal in the
doctorate of audiology (Au.D.) program.
I found this course to be the most stimulating of any I
had taken. I was enthralled by hearing physiology, as so
much of it is described in my own language of audio and
physics. After graduation, I continued to study the field
and eventually developed a course in hearing physiology,
“Studies in Hearing,” specifically tailored to students in
the Audio Arts & Acoustics Department at Columbia
College Chicago.
The course’s aim is to teach basic hearing physiology,
followed by the mechanics of hearing loss; audiology;
Deaf culture; cochlear implants; and most importantly,
hearing conservation. By the end of the course, close
to half of my students head to Sensaphonics Hearing
Conservation, a leading audiology clinic in Chicago, to
be fitted for a pair of custom-molded earplugs.
In their careers, many former students, now sound
engineers or musicians, join me in preaching the
message of safe hearing. They now see the far-reaching
implications of hearing loss, not just for themselves but
for their clients and audiences too. It’s all quite rewarding
for me as a teacher. We are the only audio program in the
nation with a hearing curriculum.
In addition to my physiology class, we offer courses in
psychoacoustics (how the brain processes the tonal and
volume information delivered by the ear) and hearing
cognition (how we actually interpret that information as
music or speech). I am especially proud of the fact that
every year two to four of our graduates go on to pursue
Au.D. degrees.

How the Workshop Began
I conceived of the Hearing Conservation Workshop
in October 2007. In a meeting with colleagues at a
conference of the Audio Engineering Society, a professional
organization, it struck me that I could compress my
semester-long course into a two-hour seminar and take it
on the road. By the following April, I launched the website
HearTomorrow.org and conducted my first workshops

at NYU and Southern Illinois University, presenting
to sound engineers and musicians. This summer I’ll be
doing my eighth annual workshop at NYU.
The workshop runs in three sections: hearing physiology,
the mechanics of noise-induced loss, and conservation
strategies. For hearing physiology, I focus on those
functions that will provide a basis for understanding the
mechanics of noise-induced hearing loss.
The second unit covers disorders and hazards. I explain
the effect of noise trauma on the tonal, pitch, and dynamic
response of hearing, and I list many non-musical noise
hazards such as sporting events and recreational vehicles.
The third section, conservation, looks at understanding
exposure limits and hearing protection methodologies,
including the use of high-fidelity, custom-molded earplugs
and in-ear monitor systems when performing live.
For me the workshops are a joy to present. I get to teach
and perform to an audi