Hm.

After some exercises that resolved into increasingly dissonant (to me) chords ("you have to get used to it, I mentioned the Other Reason I started learning jazz piano months ago; the type of cognitive dissonance it gives me feels like the same kind of mental pain I get when I put on my hearing aids, and maybe by learning how to deal with one, I can better deal with the other. He was intrigued. Now I'm trying to find better ways to explain the relationship between my piano-playing and my listening, and how my hearing affects that, because I've discovered that my explanations only actually work well for engineers ("so imagine a filter that looks like this...").

I will someday have to make better, custom-fit recordings of this sort of thing, but here are some sound files from Phonak and a bunch of mp3s . I have a severe high-frequency sensorineural loss that's noticeably worse than the "moderate" loss displayed by Phonak (as far as I can tell by eyeballing the audiogram), and I can't hear the 2000Hz sample (and higher) with my laptop speakers cranked all the way up (...not saying much, I know), and beyond that I'm not sure how to give others a good gauge for this, because I'm locked inside my own head, my own cochlea.

Incidentally, when I listen to the samples from both sites, I don't notice any difference in sound quality - only volume. I hear all the same noises, as far as I can tell. They're just softer. So I'm curious to hear what sounds disappear, reappear, transform, pop out, or otherwise sound different to you folks with normal hearing. I'll also note that I'm listening to these on laptop speakers, not exactly known for their range and quality of audio reproduction.

Yeah, I'm spiral-learning on this. A lot. Forgive my repetition; these are as much for my present self to make sense of the world as they are for my future self to look back on what I used to wonder.