We've all been there: you're in a cafe, a restaurant, or even a busy office, and the noise level just keeps creeping up. What starts as a normal conversation gradually escalates into everyone practically shouting to be heard.
Simply put, the Lombard effect is the involuntary tendency to increase our vocal effort when speaking in loud environments. When it becomes difficult to hear ourselves or others due to background noise, we naturally raise our voices to compensate. The problem? Everyone else is doing the same thing! This creates a vicious cycle where the overall noise level continues to rise, making it even harder to understand speech.
How does the Lombard Effect Impact Us?
Even young people can have difficulties understanding speech in noisy environments and poor acoustics, and after we turn 40, we all lose the ability to hear certain high-frequency tones. Our ability to hear consonants such as S, T, F, and P decreases over time, and as we get older, our tolerance for loud sounds also decreases. This means that although we are still able to understand everything that is said in quiet environments, our speech intelligibility in noise drops significantly.
Most of us love to be in good company, meeting in a café for lunch, attending dinner parties, and events. At work, we are focused on our performance, not spending our resources on simply trying to understand what is being said when we are at important meetings and conferences. As we age or begin to struggle with hearing in loud settings, we may not notice our ability to simply communicate with colleagues or friends in noise or poor acoustics.
Traditionally, manufacturers of hearing aids and especially cheap PSAs (Personal Sound Amplifiers) have tried to solve the problem of lack of speech intelligibility through sound amplification, however, this does not solve the problem. On the contrary, it worsens speech intelligibility, and many people who benefit from their hearing aids daily prefer to take them out of their ears when the noise becomes too loud, meaning that when the Lombard Effect is present, some may have to just miss out on the conversation.
The Basic Principles behind LIZN Hearpieces®
LIZN has developed and patented a sound technology that is simple and user-centric in its basic principle: instead of amplifying the sound, LIZN attenuates the sound pressure in the room. The effect of attenuating the overall sound pressure alone actually increases our speech intelligibility, and at the same time, it becomes more pleasant and less stressful to be in the room. Another element of LIZN's technology is to amplify the sound frequencies where you find consonants such as S, T, F, and P. When we can hear the sounds that carry the meaning of the words, our speech intelligibility increases significantly and imperceptibly. Additionally, LIZN's technology uses directional amplification. If you want to listen to a specific person, you simply turn your face in that direction.
The Advanced Realization
Although the basic principles of LIZN's sound technology are simple and logical, the execution requires very advanced sound processing and an extremely well-tuned acoustic design of LIZN's devices. It also requires that the sound processing takes place extremely quickly. People with good hearing will experience an unpleasant resonance if the sound coming through the devices is delayed in relation to the sound coming from the outside world, as our brains are able to perceive a time difference of just a few microseconds, requiring an extremely fast sound processing time. Knowing this first-hand, we’ve created products that are human-centric and constantly evolving.
To learn more about how LIZN Hearpieces® can help you hear better in noise, visit LIZN.com
