Angel Sounds Therapy

I mentioned in a prior post that I use the free Angel Sounds app on my iPad to do the majority of my aural therapy.  I thought I'd share what it looks like and some of my observations and comments from using it a few months.

The first and last pictures above are screenshots of the settings within the Angel Sounds app and the middle picture is to give you a sample of the type of words that would appear in the test if the settings were those on the first screenshot above.   

I strongly encourage anyone who is doing therapy to write down the words you are getting wrong because there might be a pattern to them.  The last time I had a mapping appointment I took some of my chicken scratching, aka notes, with me and my audiologist asked if she could make copies for her records.  If I'd known she would want them, I would have written on something nicer than a notepad I got at a convention.  

When I do my therapy, I always start with the listening setting as quiet, to sort of warm up my brain before getting to the cafe setting.  When I first started therapy I usually got a 92% or higher.  I don't think that is a true reflection of how well I am hearing and understanding so I now cover up the  answers while I listen to see if I can understand what word is spoken without having choices to help me figure it out. 

After I finish my testing with a quiet setting I change the listening setting to cafe, keeping the module and difficulty settings the same.  When I do this test I don't cover up the words.  Understanding in the cafe setting can be frustrating enough I figure I need all the help I can get.

Many times I can hear/understand a phonic clearly and then it's a matter of piecing together whether the consonants start or end with a hard sound, like a 't' or a soft sound, like 'f'.  I understand words that end in a 't' very well, but as you can imagine, an 'm' might sound like an 'n' to me.  Sometimes I can't figure out the logic in the way I hear things.  For instance, one time the word 'laugh' sounded like 'rag' to me and 'lobe' sounded like 'null'.  I can't explain why my brain thought those are the words it heard.

Some of the words in the tests are not common words, at least not to me.  'Shem' and 'fem' are a couple of examples.  It's hard to decipher what you are hearing when it's a word your brain isn't used to hearing on a routine basis.  When I had these words show up in last week's testing, I looked them up in my dictionary app to see if they exist. I was so certain they weren't words, but I was proven wrong.  According to Webster's dictionary, fem is an abbreviation and femme is a word, but Angel Sounds only uses 'fem'.  The use of obscure words is a small quirk, one I can easily overlook since the app is free.