Sarasera

The band I play in

By Sara on July 1, 2009

I play saxophone in the Charlottesville Municipal Band, specifically tenor saxophone. I found the band after moving to Charlottesville in 2006. I waited until January of 2007 to join though as I didn’t get settled in at my job until late October and it’s always easier to join a group right after a concert. So we attended the 2006 Holiday Concert and in 2007 I became a member.

There are almost 90 people in the band but overall I find the instrumentation quite well balanced. We have a decent rhythm section, and I believe as many as 5 tuba/euphonium players. The sax section seems to hover around the size it should be. If we are short saxes then there’s a clarinetist or two who can help us out, and if we have too many, we can send them back to the clarinets.

We play around 10 concerts a year with 7 in the months of June, July and August. This weekend, being July 4th, the band is playing a lot of Partriotic music. We have a concert tomorrow evening starting at 7:30 in the Pavilion downtown. If anyone is going, let me know, there is free parking available at the Lexis Nexus just off of Market St: http://tinyurl.com/bandparking

We also play music before the annual Naturalization (citizenship) ceremony held every year on July 4th at Jefferson’s Monticello. Last year the (then) president of the US was the guest speaker. The band had to be on the bus to the site at 6am, had to pass through the metal detectors and was surrounded by secret service the whole time. This year the guest speaker is Virginia Congressman, Tom Periello, and the band’s bus doesn’t leave until 8:30 am.

The next two concerts should provide All the patriotic music anyone could ever want… (and then some?)

Thunderer
Days of Glory
Irving Berlin’s songs for America
El Capitan
King Cotton
American Anthem – Tuesday Folder
Fairest of the Fair – Jim Simmons conducting
Semper Fidelis
Armed Forces Salute – Tuesday Folder
Washington Post – Tuesday Folder
Albemarle Overture – Tuesday Folder
March Independentia
Americana Two Step
Westerner
Men Of Ohio
America the Beautiful
Stars and Stripes

Posted in Music | Tagged band, concerts, july 4th, monticello, Music | 3 Responses

Using the phone with a relay service

By Sara on July 1, 2009

I just read a post over at earplugs about dealing with phone calls that have the voice menu systems. A nuissance for deaf and hearing alike.

In the past years I’ve gotten very comfortable making these kinds of calls though. I am much more comfortable with calls to someone who gets paid to answer the phone and deal with my requests than I am with calling a friend or colleague. I would only subject them to a relay service call if it was an emergency and I had no other way to reach them.

For calls to customer service centers though I always use a telecommunications relay service. This is a free service for those with hearing or speech issues that is paid for out of taxes on every phone bill. Once upon a time I had a real TTY for such calls but for the past 8+ years the websites and IM relays have been working great. (The internet relays have led to issues/controversy due to foreign scammers using them, but that’s a topic for another post.)

Normally I use http://ip-relay.com/ but there are many others. I can also send an IM to ATTRelay on AIM and that will connect me to make a call. I even have an incoming phone number that will contact me by IM via the relay or email me with a message if one is left. I use this for services that require a phone number. There’s also Web-based Captel http://www.sprintcaptel.com (Why don’t they have an incoming 10 digit number for captel??)

Captel is neat, they call you back and set up a 3-way call where you can talk and hear the person you’re calling and the operator can hear too and types captions that appear in your web browser. However, I prefer straight relay for customer service calls. I type the number, the caller assistant (CA, operator) calls it and types what the person I’m calling says, I type back and the CA reads it to them. Slow obviously, but accurate with minimal work on my part.

I prefer this for calling customer service centers because if the caller assistant doesn’t hear the person or doesn’t hear the recording they make it their job to figure out what was said before they share that information with you by typing it. With CapTel you get faster captions and you can hear and respond by voice, but you’re also responsible for asking for a repeat if the CA didn’t hear something.

I rarely have problems using relay with customer service reps of big companies. Using it for the doctor’s office locally doesn’t go so well, using it to make a hair appointment always results in them hanging up on me. CapTel would be better for those, but I usually ask my boyfriend to call. He also orders my lunch for me most days.

As an additional note, there are also Video relay services for people who are comfortable with sign language. I haven’t gotten brave enough to try them yet. They may be faster, but since I’m much more comfortable in written English I’m perfectly happy with text based relay.

Posted in Hearing | Tagged captel, phone calls, relay, telephone, TRS | 2 Responses

My thoughts on “Sound and WAY Beyond”

By Sara on June 29, 2009

I’ve been curious about the Sound and WAY Beyond auditory training from Cochlear (one of the 3 cochlear implant brands). Problem is, it’s $99 (maybe more since I’m not a Cochlear customer) and it doesn’t run on a Mac (believe it or not I’m not set up to run Windows on my Mac. I have never needed to!). I do have a PC laptop for work that I could use, but still, it’s a lot of money to spend for something that might not really fit my needs anyway.

So I was looking on the web for more information about this software when I came across something surprising. A Free Demo version that I could download! I’m not sure if this is an approved demo for distribution online or what the deal is, but I am very happy to have found it.

For more info check out this article, An Interview with VP for Consumer Affairs at Cochlear.

My thoughts on the product:

Any closed set sentences are too easy for me. I can tell sentence A from B or C or D. Words are a little harder, but still too easy if I’m given a choice to choose from. However, the software also provides Open sets where you have to type the sentence you think you heard or type the word. This is definitely harder and better practice for me. Sometimes I type the wrong spelling of the same word and lose points, but that’s just a minor annoyance.

I found the sounds on the training in the environmental sounds very very annoying and no way to say ‘ok, I get it! skip to the next one now!’

The music module is great too. I think it’s pretty optimistic sometimes, I have had ear training in music threory classes that was easier than some of the exercises. In one exercise they give you the starting pitch and you can choose if you want to hear one, two, three additional pitches. Then you have to write what yo hear on the staff. So it’s ear training and written training at the same time. There is also a ‘name the instrument’ after hearing just a single note. I can tell the piano from the others, but the violin and the trumpet recordings sound about the same to me, even with my hearing aid.

Bottom line, if they had a Mac version I would buy it, but since they don’t, the demo version that I can only use at work is really nice to have. It isn’t a very limited demo, except that the tests quit after 5 “questions” and take you back to the menu. It also will not save any statistics for you.

Posted in Hearing | Tagged cochlear, rehabilitation, sound and way beyond | 2 Responses

Adding captions to online video content

By Sara on June 26, 2009

A friend of mine on Twitter today was talking about a new venture of video on the internet. I piped up with a note about making video content accessible to those of us who can’t hear dialog. He said good point but where do we start?

So this is a compilation of resources to answer that question.

YouTube supports closed captions and video creators/uploaders can add them to their own content: Getting Started: Captions / Subtitles definition – YouTube Help

But what if you want to caption someone else’s video? Like a movie trailer for example. Check out Overstream.net, they have a tool that lets you add the captions to their site but stream the content from another site.

Other options include services that will provide captions or subtitles free on request:
SubPLY looks like they are using an automatic speech to text translation. I need to test this one as that never does work well automatically.

Project Read:On used to take requests but seems to be only for-hire these days.

And be sure to check out Bill Cresswell, who’s motto is captioning the internet one video at a time.

Of course the simplest option to providing Equal Communication Access is to just paste the text as a transcript. This is the better-than-nothing approach and very much appreciated.

Posted in Hearing | Tagged captions, equal communication access, youtube | 6 Responses

How to get song lyrics into your iPod

By Sara on June 26, 2009

I’ve had a couple of people ask me how I’m having lyrics displayed on my iPhone/iPod. This is something that’s eluded me for a while now, so I thought I’d write it up.

First off, you probably need to use iTunes for your music. Since iTunes is the easiest way to get music onto an iPod to being with you probably already have it. Inside of iTunes in the Info panel for each song (CTRL+I to view) you can change the title, album, track info. There is also a tab for Lyrics. Whatever is pasted into this Lyrics tab will display on your iPod. This page has a basic step-by-step guide for iPods: iTunes: Adding song lyrics to iPod (apple.com)

So where do you find the lyrics? Generally a google search will turn them up. But doing that for every song gets tedious. This is where lyric software comes in. When you play a song in iTunes the software searches for the lyrics and automatically adds them to the lyrics information tab.

Since I use a Mac for my iTunes library I used the software called iClip Lyrics from 1th Dream. (How does one pronounce 1th by the way?) Someone on Twitter posted about it and it worked really well. Here’s the link: http://www.1thdream.com/

What I did with mine was verified that it was working and then just let the songs play with the sound off on my mac. There’s probably an apple script that would run through them all faster, but I wasn’t really in a hurry and it only took a day.

For PC users, I’m sure the same type of software exists, but I don’t have experience with any of it… if you have one to share, leave a comment.

Another thing to note is that some artists or recording labels consider posting of lyrics a copyright infringement. This is why Apple provided the ability to add and display lyrics, but not the actual lyrics themselves.

Posted in Music | Tagged how-to, iphone, ipod, itunes, lyrics, Music | 3 Responses

Music lately

By Sara on June 25, 2009

I can’t get myself to start typing this because I’m listening to music on my iPhone (built in iPod) and I’ve managed to load lyrics to almost all of my 1500 some songs. If I type then I can’t read along and the lyrics get lost.

Music is sounding pretty good, even with just my CI. The bass is a bit tinny… the vocals quite squawky, chipmunky but not high pitched. I can recognize Frank Sinatra as Frank Sinatra (very low voice).

Songs that I know really well sound the best. For the curious this includes all the songs from RENT, a few Moxy Fruvous CDs and a couple of Phish songs… But not the Damien Rice album I bought right before my surgery… and not any of the albums that came from Don’s CDs.

I’ve noticed in band as well as in recorded music that sustained notes will have a very accurate pitch, but short notes sound monotone. If I know the song I don’t notice this too much though. When the band plays a scale it sounds very monotone because the tones are far from pure with 90 of us playing at one time. This takes me back to 5th grade band though and the first time we ever heard a band from sitting within the band… it was a new experience.

The Sound and Way Beyond aural rehabilitation DVD has a lot of music practice exercises. I can’t hear the difference between notes closer than 2 semi-tones. This means that when I’m playing in the wrong key I don’t notice at the first wrong note. But I use a million visual cues in band. I watch the fingers of the people next to me, I watch their toes, I watch the director, all while reading the music. No wonder I miss the key change! I’ve made a point to pay closer attention to them after missing every single one at one rehearsal.

Also on the Sound and Way Beyond DVD is a listening exercise that would be tricky with perfect hearing – it plays 2, 3, 4 notes and you have to choose what they are on the staff based on the starting note. It would be better if you could experiment until you found the right interval by ear rather than getting just one guess and a right or wrong score.

Another music exercise involves identifying different musical instruments, but you’re supposed to be able to tell from one note if it’s a trumpet, piano, violin, etc. I don’t know how good their recordings are. I can hear the difference between them all, but I can’t easily pick out which one it is with just one note to hear, except maybe the piano.

I listen to music every day on my way to and from work in my car but of course that has a ton of background noise too from being on the road.

Bass is still a bit thin and rumbley rather than musical. I’m working on setting up a bilateral / bimodal headset. I ended up with 2 med-el direct input cables on accident somehow so instead of buying a bilateral one I’ll probably buy a $2 dual connector/splitter from radio shack and plug both into that. For some reason my FM system won’t consistently switch to direct input anymore, but I might be able to use it via bluetooth for my iphone now.

ETA: Ironically, one of the worst sounds for me right after activation was saxophones… I have a ton of saxophone ensemble recordings that I know very well. I’m happy to say that they are sounding Great now. I’m currently listening to Beppo’s To Ballard by The Tiptons (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-159j-epkI) and it sounds almost as good as I remember. Not a long memory as this was my newest CD…

Posted in Hearing, Music | Tagged CI, iphone, Music | 2 Responses

New videos from MedEl

By Sara on June 12, 2009

The MedEl website has new testimonial videos posted…

http://www.medel.com/US/img/videos/

Posted in Hearing | Leave a response

1 Month Audiogram and 6 week update

By Sara on June 10, 2009

I’m a little bit hesitant to post this news because my test results definitely don’t seem to match with what I’m experiencing in the “real world” and people already have expectations that are too high. My co-worker told me that my boss thinks I’ll be able to hear him yell across a field to me. I have to constantly get him to face me when we are working in the lab. I am always reminding him that I can’t understand the speaker phone even if he turns it up. Not to mention all the requests for phone calls I’ll get if my family thinks I can hear on the phone. I still hate the phone. I don’t plan on adding minutes to my voice plan. Learn to text message or IM if you want to talk to me.

But here goes…

It had only been two weeks from my first map and I didn’t think my hearing with the CI had changed much at all in that time. So I was more than a bit shocked when my audiologist put me in the sound testing booth and played the CUNY sentences. I understood them all almost perfectly. She actually stopped me half way through and said “Sara, do you know this list? You keep smiling!” I said “Nooo! I’m just smiling because I can hear them! They are easy!” The CUNY sentences were pretty easy, I got 60-some percent last time. Then she switched to the HNT sentences in quiet. Last time they were very difficult to hear, the voice was barely audible. Surprise, this time they were almost as easy as the CUNY sentences. Wow. Then she did HNT in noise (quiet noise with the voice louder). That was harder but I still scored in the 70s. CNC words – definitely still hard, but I got around 50%. This was on the HD-CIS coded program that is optimized for speech. I normally use FSP because it sounds “fuller” or “richer” to me. When we switched to FSP my scores all dropped by about 10%. She said this wasn’t surprising and we are still planning for me to use FSP coding.

I now have four programs – 1 and 2 are the same settings that don’t give me sound outside of the speech range (nothing below 250 Hz and nothing above 4000 or 5000 I think). 1 is the HD-CIS coding and 2 is FSP. Program 3 is a program designed for speech in a very noisy place, such as a restaurant. This is nice because the sensitivity adjustment never cut out anything in a restaurant. Program 4 is FSP with a full range of frequencies – very good for music or listening to birds when I want to hear more than speech.

Another change is that I’ve gone bi-modal. My audiologist said that when I decided to I could wear my hearing aid again in the unimplanted ear but that she recommended sticking with it and not going back and forth. So I decided to do that on my drive home from Chapel Hill. My goal has always been to hear low sounds via the hearing aid, I just wanted to make sure the implanted ear got a good start. I still feel like the hearing aid is barely there. It’s very overpowered by the sounds from the CI. After my next map (mid August) I’m going to see if I can get it adjusted (probably have to visit my local audiologist) to feel more balanced.

Posted in Hearing | Tagged audiogram, coding, FSP, HD-CIS, Med-El | 9 Responses

Thoughts on improving education in the US

By Sara on June 10, 2009

First note, this topic isn’t aimed at education of kids with a hearing loss, it’s just about education in the US in general.

Last week I saw someone post an article on Twitter about all the funding towards increasing technology for schools. Computers, networks, infrastructure, educational software programs, etc, etc. Billions of dollars each year. (That article is here: http://www.citejournal.org/vol1/iss1/currentissues/general/article1.htm but that isn’t the topic I’m posting on here, it’s just what inspired thought on the topic).

A discussion about this with Don got us talking about how the problem with education in this country is two fold. 1. Our society (at large) doesn’t value education. This is further emphasized by the second point. 2. Compensation for teachers is too low.

Ironically there were two articles in the NY Times that very day that covered both of these topics.

In Rising Above IQ the columnist discusses how the attitude of people towards education can lead to their success. He brushes on nature vs nurture and how IQ is not determined by genetics. I’m sure ‘home environment’ plays a key roll. People who are well educated themselves are very likely to push their children to reach high goals.

Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”

On to point two, improving education by getting the best teachers. How does a corporation go about finding the best candidates for a job? They offer something attractive and then choose from the best resumes they receive. Does a school get to do this? Not with the salaries they typically offer. The average according to CBSalary.com is $46,000. Salary.com lists the 25th-75th percentile range as $41,000 and $61,000. This doesn’t as bad as I’ve heard, but it isn’t exactly prestigious either. As comparisons, an engineering manager averages $82,000 and ranges from $62,000 to $110,000. 25th percentile for Attorneys is $140,000 with bonuses and almost $200,000 for the 75th percentile. Since I have a lot of cochlear implanted readers, how about our surgeons? A Surgeon of Neurology ranges from $375,000 to $600,000 a year! That’s how you get the best people interested.

Yes, I’m glad my surgeon is highly trained and I suppose you don’t need that much training to teach kids to do math and science, but what happens when you increase the benefits of teaching to attract a wider range of experienced, motivated, well educated people?

The second NYTimes article (Next Test: Value of $125,000-a-Year Teachers) is a followup to a story I read last year. It’s about a charter school in NYC that will pay its teachers $125,000 a year. They are using all public funding except for that which covers their location. This means that the main difference in this school versus other charter schools is the teacher salary. They had over 800 people apply, interviewed 100 in person and chose 8. They are starting with just one grade and will add another grade next year. It’s an experiment that I’m looking forward to following along with.

I’m not saying that teaching school is easy and that paying a higher salary will solve all the problems. I just think that raising teacher salaries would kill two birds with one stone. We don’t value education, we don’t value our teachers, our country falls further and further behind.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged education, salary, teachers | 6 Responses

The Med-El Opus2

By Sara on June 7, 2009

I finally got around to taking some photos of my cochlear implant and accessories. It came with a lovely briefcase in the color I had chosen (reddish). The Opus2 consists of, from top to bottom, the ear hook, the processor which attaches to the wire going to the magnet coil head piece, and to the power pack. The power packs hold the batteries and can be exchanged to hold either rechargeable or disposable batteries. Then there is the cover that slips over the power pack and batteries. This cover can be just plastic, or can contain a 3-prong direct connect plug at the bottom.

Here’s a link to the photo album if you can’t see the slideshow: Med-El Duet2 on Flickr

I love that I don’t have to be stuck with one type of battery or another. The rechargeables are great but only last about 10 hours. If I ever get out camping or sailing or somewhere away from a normal outlet then I’ll be happy to be able to use disposable batteries during that time. I’m told that 3 disposable batteries last about 3 days.

I also use the direct connect cable a LOT. I’ve just finished reading and listening to The Count of Monte Cristo and highly recommend the original version even though it’s really long. Leaving the cover with the direct connect plug on it makes the processor longer and heavier behind my hear, but I don’t notice it much and it’s nice to be able to plug in to my iPhone whenever I want to without switching the parts.

Lastly, I think it’s funny that they made such a big deal out of choosing the color I wanted and then gave me all six colors as covers. You can see that one I’m wearing has a bit of black in the middle of it. This is the rechargeable power pack being black and the processor and cover being red. I think it’s cool.

Posted in Hearing | Tagged cochlear implant, Med-El, opus2, pictures | 5 Responses