Left/right ear differences

[Hipper]

A few years ago I was listening to a set of acoustic tests using headphones which included some higher frequency test tones. For 7kHz I only heard the sound in my left ear ear. It was a bit of a shock! Turned the headphones round and still could not hear it in my right ear. I presumed I'm deaf to 7Khz in that ear. 7kHz is not a test tone on your typical test tone CDs, at least not on mine. The rest of my hearing is the same for both ears.

I never noticed any issues before or since when listening to music or voices.

 

[Inner Space]

Is there any broad correlation with what side of the road you drive on? I.e., which window you have open?

 

[EZ Meno]

Interesting... Most People Prefer Right Ear for Listening | Live Science

I prefer my right ear as well.

Interesting article. I haven't noticed that I prefer either side except when I talk on the phone I pfrefer the left ear. But the article seems to say that the ear preference is not just about the ear, but the brain as well. So, I wonder if I can train my right ear (and left hemisphere) to be similar to the left ear when talking on the phone.
Another interesting thing in the article: "The left hemisphere, moreover, is more involved in approach behavior, whereas the right has a role in withdrawal and avoidance behavior ". This sounds like there's a correlation to introversion/extroversion or some other personality trait. I'm very much an introvert and definitely have more withdrawal and avoidance behavior. That seems to be consistent with what the article says. But can't make any conclusions from a sample size of one.

 

[EZ Meno]

Is there any broad correlation with what side of the road you drive on? I.e., which window you have open?

I always drove on the right side of the road and rarely keep the window open, so I don't think that's it.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

So, I wonder if I can train my right ear (and left hemisphere) to be similar to the left ear when talking on the phone.

Each hemisphere gets roughly the same input from both ears.

 

[Ron Texas]

Go someplace where you will not annoy anyone and use the speaker feature.

 

[simplex]

That sounds like a sensible explanation, but it's not that. It doesn't matter how I hold the phone there's a big difference. Partly because of that I never hold the phone on the right ear. Just like @Doodski .

How about repeating the test with a pair of in ear headphones? Reasonable hardware quality assumed, this should at least eliminate random errors caused by placing the phone in different ways at your left and right ear.

 

[Hipper]

Interesting... Most People Prefer Right Ear for Listening | Live Science

I prefer my right ear as well.

As I, and most people, are right handed, it doesn't make sense to hold the phone in your right hand when you need to dial numbers or write things down.

 

[Berwhale]

Interesting read...

The Remarkable History of Right-Ear Advantage - Hearing Review

"...this means that input to the right ear travels directly to the left-hemisphere processor via the crossed path from right ear to left hemisphere, but the input to the left ear must travel first to the right hemisphere, then cross over to the left hemisphere speech processor via the corpus callosum, the neural bridge between the two cerebral hemispheres. This introduces a very slight delay and loss of efficiency of the left ear input—not much, but enough to account for the small REA/LED noted above. Note that the problem resides in neither hemisphere, but in the bridge between them, the corpus callosum."

The bad news is that this disparity between left and right ears gets worse as you get older...

 

[wemist01]

The could be objectively different. I got a punctured eardrum on one side as a kid and had tubes several times. One ear is worse than the other.

 

[Kal Rubinson]

The Remarkable History of Right-Ear Advantage - Hearing Review

"...this means that input to the right ear travels directly to the left-hemisphere processor via the crossed path from right ear to left hemisphere, but the input to the left ear must travel first to the right hemisphere, then cross over to the left hemisphere speech processor via the corpus callosum, the neural bridge between the two cerebral hemispheres. This introduces a very slight delay and loss of efficiency of the left ear input—not much, but enough to account for the small REA/LED noted above. Note that the problem resides in neither hemisphere, but in the bridge between them, the corpus callosum."

The bad news is that this disparity between left and right ears gets worse as you get older...

The bad news is that this is not whole truth. Anatomically, both hemispheres receive input from both ears via multiple crossing connections in the brainstem. What the corpus callosum does is provide to each auditory cortex information of the processing in the opposite auditory cortex in addition to the "direct" input from both ears.

 

[onion]

In a recent update to BACCH4Mac, the release notes contained the following information about a new feature:


2. Soundstage Balance Control (Intro Edition and above):
There is now a horizontal slider that appears under the Master Volume fader when any bin other than the Bypass bin is selected. This slider, we call Soundstage Balance Control (SSBC), is very effective at fixing issues of soundstage asymmetry that may arise in the following cases (to be distinguished from the intended/natural spatial distribution of sound level at the recording/production stage):

2.a Asymmetric Rooms: Highly asymmetric (Left-Right) sound pressure distribution in the listening room.

2.b Content with inherent or degraded Left-Right balance: Some stereo recordings, most notably on old tapes and vinyl, may have a left-right unbalance due to production non-idealities and/or media degradation.

2.c Content with large inter-aural time difference (ITD) values: Recent (and yet unpublished) research at Princeton University’s 3D3A Lab has shown that while level (ILD) panning is robust and left-right symmetric for human listeners who have no differential (left-right unbalance) hearing issues, many (at least 20%) of the same listeners perceive ITD panning to be asymmetric, i.e. audibly biased to the right or left. There seems to be an anti-correlation between the side of the asymmetry and whether the listener is left-eye or right-eye dominant, with right-eye dominant listeners perceiving the soundstage louder on the left side than the right side (and the opposite for left-eye dominant listeners). (Here is a simple test to find out if you are left or right-eye dominant: https://www.allaboutvision.com/resources/dominant-eye-test.htm). Some recordings (especially acoustic recordings made with ITD-based stereo microphone techniques, such as the “spaced omni” or “Decca tree” techniques), may contain high enough ITD values to make such an asymmetry audible.