Shouting When We Can't Hear

Welcome back!

For my first post on a weekly schedule I want to talk about how we tend to shout when we can't hear well. It is a topic that has always baffled me and made me wonder why people tend to do this.

At first I thought the whole idea was irritating and people did not need to do it. In theory your ability to hear should not affect how soft or loud you speak. You have the ability to speak at the same volume when you can hear and when you cannot hear. At the time this was reason enough for me to say that the whole idea of shouting when we can't hear was uncalled for and irritating. I concluded that people were shouting because they wanted to be irritating and left it at that. However my view of the situation changed over time.

Now I know more about the relation between speech and hearing and why we tend to shout when we can't hear. The question that made me rethink my views was "How do you know the volume of your speech if you can't hear it yourself?" This was a tricky question to answer as I personally am a soft speaker and tend to think that I am speaking at an appropriate volume while others may not hear me. I thought well if you want to speak at a normal volume you just "think" that and your body responds appropriately. That of course was not the case.

In reality if you truly want to know how soft or loud your speech is you need to be able to hear it. Due to this if we can't hear well we tend to increase our volume until it reaches a volume at that we can hear clearly at that time. Using numbers as an example, say your hearing is dampened by 50% below normal. In order to hear a volume of 10 you would need to speak at a volume of 15 or 50% louder than normal.

Even though the concept makes sense to me now it still irritates me that people shout when they can't hear well or have some noise preventing them from hearing you well (like having headphones on). We all speak and we all should have enough muscle memory to speak at our normal volume even when there is some noise blocking some of our potential hearing.

Just some random thoughts let me know what you think! Next time I am going to talk about Cheating: What is it really?

 Bye for now,

 Superskull85 - The Dark Skull