Sound and Beyond

Okay, this computer program is quite hard for a deaf person.

I uploaded a program to my computer called 'Sound and Beyond' and I recall the one thing my audiologist said to me when I got it from him.... "it's hard." And he was right... My audiologist is also deaf, and has two cochlear implants, so I have to take his word for it. He said that it is not an easy program to get through, however it is beneficial in how it works my listening skills. It is an easy thing to do when I am alone in the room with nothing else to do, and being at college, it is not easy to have someone take the time to work on listening with. There are so many other things I rather be doing than working on my listening skills.

But anyways, just this past week I actually got bored enough to try it. It was quite tough to do... and made me realize how much work I need to do in order to get better at listening. The first thing I did in the program was to do the auditory assessment which tested where I am at currently when it comes to my listening skills.

There was three tests, the first one was a pure tone test, where it gave me three sounds, two are the same sound and another is different. I have to pick the one that is different. It was tricky to do that due to how close they sounded... But that was my best test overall compared to the rest that I did after that. Most of the tests in this category, I get around half of them correct.

The second test I did was a grid of words, all similar in sound/saying whatever. This specific one used words that was 'h...d' pretty much, and some were made up which made it harder when I couldn't hear the words before I started, so I kinda had to guess what they would sound like in order to match it. It was like a matching game where I have to pick the word that the computer just said. On that test, I scored a 20 percent.... eh... it was hard... haha.

My third test was worse.... It was also a grid of words, but it was a consonant recognition one, where it had 'aBa' etc... so I have to pick based on the middle sound that I hear. It was a lot harder for me to do this one due to what the choices were, they had 's' 'sh' 'ch' 'th' 'j' which usually all sound similar to me.... But anyways, I scored 15% on that, and that's eh. I can keep working on it though.

This program is tough, but if I do not challenge myself I will not grow in my listening skills and continue at this stable level that I've been at every time I go see Mark, my audiologist. Next time I see him, I'm hoping for an improvement, even if it's marginal.

Anywhoooo, that's my update.

Until next time,

-Annie