Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Hearing in common spaces - continues hearing loops/sound systems

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Mar 4, 2026, at 11:22 AM, Allison Tom via Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] 
> cohousing.org> wrote:

> I'm also tired of not hearing what's happening in meetings, even with my
> own hearing aids optimized.  And, even more, I'm tired of having people
> roll their eyes at me when I ask them to speak up.  (Yes, we have a lot of
> interpersonal issues that are festering as well.)  There's something about
> our common house that just swallows sound, and I have pretty much given up
> attending anything there - meals, meetings, you name it. 

This might be a good time to use a Decibel Meter app on your iPhone to test how 
loud the voice is by the time it reaches you in your seat. Compare one voice to 
another. Check yourself to see if the sound is loud or soft in relation to 
other voices, or you weren’t listening. If there are specific people who cannot 
speark up for one reason or another, talk to your facilitators and ask them to 
always repeat that person's comments. People for whom English is not their 
first language will often not want to speak up — they hear the imperfections 
their own pronunciations that actually don’t bother others.

There are also things you can do to fix problems yourself. When we moved in we 
ony had hard surface chairs and tables. As people upgraded or gave away soft 
furniture it made a huge difference.  You want to break up open areas where 
sound can travel and bounce back and forth again. A large rug in the front of 
the room or where the facilitator is can make a huge difference, for example. 
Roll it up after the meeting and store it someplace else.

Some fixes will do more for you than a sound person will admit. Sound people 
use professional standards and only want to discuss solutions that have been 
measured scientifically to reduce sound. You probably don’t need the quality of 
a large concert hall. Nice, but not necessary.

Hearing aids are also not the great fixes that people think they are. In large 
meetings or groups of people they add problems by amplifying everything so you 
hear less than without them.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Riderwood Village, Silver Spring MD
Founding member, 25 years in Takoma Village, Washington DC