Experience acquired during the Covid19 lockdown has shown that extremely undesirable short/medium/and potentially long term symptoms can arise as a consequence of even not-so-prolonged exposure to “junk”, platform sound in the interpreting booth. Receiving an artificial, narrow-spectrum “RSI type” feed (be it at home or at a fully-equipped, ISO-compliant professional interpreting hub) forces interpreters to misuse and overwork their hearing in a number of ways both at a peripheral (ears) and at a central nervous system (brainstem) level. when the listening effort is made in the presence of interference and two streams must be monitored at the same time. The huge chunks of the audible spectrum that are absent cannot be restored by any machine or sound engineer, and sound which has been manipulated by algorithms along the transmission chain cannot possibly be improved downstream, even in “hybrid” or “hub” mode as only minor adjustments are possible that do not make RSI sound less harmful.Ĭontrary to the dangerously widespread mantra “The higher parts of the audible spectrum are not really necessary when it comes to understanding speech”, the upper portions of the human vocal spectrum are there for a number of reasons that turn out to be particularly useful when people are required to listen, perfectly understand, process and simultaneously interpret speech, i.e. Its frequency range is limited to no more than one third of the audible spectrum and noise suppression, feedback cancelling and other algorithms originally developed to “improve” the listening experience end up manipulating and distorting the remaining frequency band.
RSI (Remote Simultaneus Interpreting) platform sound is poor quality sound.
(Agnew, 1998, underscoring added by the author for emphasis) Abstract
“ Do no harm so that the amplified signal is not unintentionally or undesirably altered by the hearing aid.”
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