How's Your Hearing?

You are about 20 years old

The teen repellent will no longer foil you, but you can still hear some pretty high tones. The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 16.7kHz

Find out which ultrasonic ringtones you can hear!

A couple weeks ago, as was told secondhand, our pastor played a series of different ringtones over the speakers to illustrate how hearing declines with age-- only the younger folks were able to hear the higher-pitched tones. I wasn't at the service that day, but heard all about it at lunch afterward. I was curious to know how much I would've been able to hear, considering I have pretty sharp hearing. Would my hearing fall into the normal range of other thirty-somethings? Would I have been able to join the ranks of the teenagers hearing the highest frequency tones?

As it turns out, these tones are available at this website: http://www.ultrasonic-ringtones.com/

I tried playing the tones in order, and stopped at 16.7 kHz. Apparently, according to the "quiz" result, that puts my hearing on par with that of an average 20-year-old. Not bad, considering I'm a dozen years older than that ;-) And despite his poor hearing and despite the fact that he's pushing 40, Allan could still hear tones "reserved" for thirty-somethings ;-) That ought to make him feel young.

What's interesting to note is that although I couldn't actually hear any tones beyond 16.7 kHz, at the higher frequencies (except for the very last one) I could still detect a change in the air indicating that something was vibrating, I just couldn't hear the actual sound itself. That was fascinating to me.

I've always maintained that I have extra-sensitive hearing to make up for my very poor eyesight. I don't know what my eyesight is in terms of the 20/20 scale (those numbers have always been meaningless to me) but I can tell you my eyeglass prescription: exactly -5 in one eye, and -4.75 in the other, plus a touch of astigmatism. Allan is the opposite-- I can discern almost no difference in blurriness when I try on his near-paper-thin glasses. By the time farsightedness hits him sometime this decade, he probably won't even NEED glasses anymore.

So, my hope is that Todd will get a good mix-- hearing like his Mommy, and eyesight like his Daddy. Or at the very least-- an even mix of both, yielding average nearsightedness and average hearing. I'd be happy with that :-)

How about you? How's your hearing?