four in the head and the loudest one said

Following on from yesterday's relatively short post which was short partly because I offered to photoshop a gin bottle label for Nicky's mum's birthday tomorrow and had to get it emailed to her dad in time for him to print and partly because I couldn't concentrate for the sound of the telly. This is a fairly frequent problem in our very small flat where you're either in the combined kitchen/living room, the bathroom or the bedroom. Naturally the telly and computer and oven and telephone and washing machine and sink and kettle all have to share a room and frequently impinge upon the sonic presence of another. All the things which produce mere sounds are OK but because the television emits another level of information I find it very hard to ignore. In the same way that you can't not read a word you pass your eyes over if you hear something it's very hard to ignore the meaning. As last week's New Scientist handily reiterated the brain only has so much active memory to play with and can only handle so many inputs at a time. The television's noise didn't bother me so much when I was mostly using the computer to do stupid photoshoppery but (since I started blipping) when I'm trying to think about a photograph and how best to edit it and the day I've had and what to write about whilst also trying to fend off the speech from the television it's difficult to keep the latter from preventing the rest.

The television is a strange thing; despite only having mono sound it has speakers mounted in the sides pointing backwards with the presumed intention of creating a spacious, wide sound. If the television were at the far end of a room this would be fine but as my computing-desk sits directly in the line of fire it gives rise to the second problem: I can't stand the sound of the thing nor the garbage-content of the sound. Having preserved my hearing thus far in life by not listening to headphones too frequently or loudly and so on I often find things painfully loud which other people seem barely able to hear. I can never work out what people are saying in pubs if there's any music on in the background and have recently started reflexively shushing complete strangers in the street if they wander past yelling into a mobile at a volume I consider unnecessary. The telly is often past the pain threshold whilst Nicky still claims to be unable to hear it over the combined sounds of computer-fans and keyboard-taps (even though I'm far closer to them and can still hear the telly distressingly well over them) and most of its volume is in a particularly grating upper-midrange which earplugs and noise-cancelling earbuds are unable to mask; even wearing them I can still make everything out. If any kettles or washing machines are also switched on then the telly gets tweaked upwards and I start involuntarily scowling. Nicky refuses to get her ears thoroughly syringed on the grounds that they'd just apparently start secreting wax at an ever-increasing rate, doesn't like using the properspeakers even though they deliver a much more pleasant fuller-spectrum and doesn't want to wear headphones even though (as with wearing extra clothes to keep warm in winter rather than heating all the air in the flat just to stop her toes feeling cold) it delivers the necessary thing (in this case the sound) directly to the point where it is needed (the pretty ears) without inconveniencing or damaging anything else in its path (my poor delicate cochleas and the never-to-be-regrown hair cells).

In an hopeful development she's been listening the the radio increasingly often recently (sometimes at the expense of the television) but usually doing so through my old alarm clock radio (same nasty frequency-response issues as the television) or through the digibox (and thence the telly rather than the properspeakers) which still hurt the ears so I got her a wee combination DAB/FM wireless/MP3 player thing for her birthday which is almost pleasant to listen to, portable so that the sound need not be turned up to travel far, forwards-compatible for when analogue radio is switched off and also permits the use of modern-fangled MP3 files without resorting to anything fancy like connecting her phone to some mini-speakers. The latest addition to this today was the second-last resort to getting a laptop (so that I can go somewhere quiet to typethink but also to reduce the amount of fan and typing-noise which typethinking creates and to reduce the evil power consumption of the desktop); one of those little FM transmitter things can carry the sound from the telly to the wee portable radio thing so that the sound is emitted a foot from the ear of the telly-viewer rather than three feet from my ear when I'm trying to listen to something else. If this doesn't work for being too fuzzy or for having too many buttons the same thing might be attempted with wires into the auxiliary input of the radiothing.