Why do my ears hurt when I play my piano through headphones? - Hardware & Software

Strange thing, I noticed that my ears hurt when I play my piano though headphones while having it be completely fine when it's through the speakers. I am not really sure what the source of the issue is. for whatever reason my ears have discomfort in that situation. It would be nice if it could be fixed given the privacy of headphones and them making the piano considerably more silent. I am definitely not playing it too loudly.

What headphones are they?

Are you using open or closed headphones?

Can you have an equalizer in between the headphones and the piano? Then you could adjust the treble-bass a bit to lower some frequencies, as the human ear can hear some of them too loud and it can be uncomfortable. I usually have mid-s tuned down on every device I have.

I noticed it with multiple models, the ones I am using right now are absolutely the simplest ones link however I noticed exactly the same effect with link

Might just be that they're really shitty headphones. I can't imagine ever using those tbh. Hell I'd feel pain just wearing them without playing sound through them. They don't have adequate padding and really shitty speakers which means it'll produce not-so-healthy sounds

Bear in mind that the other much higher quality ones produced an identical result in my ears.

Open means that it has nothing behind the speaker on the outside, meaning you practically just have speakers out in the open-air. Mine has a mesh backing and you can see the speaker.

Then they are probably open, although I personally determine if headphones are open if I can clearly hear shit that is around me.

If you're suffering pain while wearing headphones and it's not caused by the headphones pinching against your skin or any other physical discomfort thing like that, I suggest you get to a doctor. It may be nothing at all, but it could possibly be something more. Torley Wong is a musician who, in his youth, had an ascendant and aspiring techno career, until he began suffering severe pain from anything louder than ambient sound -- he discovered he was suffering hyperacusis, a loss of hearing expressed through a collapsed tolerance to sound. His hearing has apparently improved, and he is able to compose piano tracks as well as I guess a bit of other stuff, but his original career of techno club bangers is behind him. I am not a doctor, so don't WebMD panic yourself over me mentioning this, but my point is that if you're suffering pain from focused sound on your ears when it wasn't happening before, that's probably something to get looked at.

There is zero issue when it comes to listening to other shit with headphones or speakers at any volume to my awareness, it only seems to happen with piano sounds specifically.

But your ears shouldn't be hurting at all, riiiight?

I have absolutely zero clue because I have no frame of reference in relation to the past when it comes to playing the piano because I started playing it very recently.

Well, I'm not a musician at all, so it could be a technical issue, or you've simply got something turned up too high in some un-obvious way. Maybe your config's wrong and a simple twist of a knob or something is the ticket to painless playing, I really don't know. But if you've got other people to check things and they don't think it's too loud or painful when you suffer pain in the same situation, you will really want to keep an eye on that. Pain is your body's way of saying "wtf this is not right stop".

There is only one knob on that piano, it's not a particularly complex one. So far I am probably going to go with the idea of using an EQ, my ears are probably sensitive to some range of frequencies and eliminating those will probably help.

As a piano player I can tell you that this is really weird and you should check if you have any pain when you: 1) Find a frequency test which gradually goes from lowest frequency range of human hearing to highest and listen to it. 2) Turn on demo recording on your piano and listen to it 3) Find a recording of someone playing a piano similar to your's and listen to it And please visit a doctor to check your hearing but do not panic until they tell you if anything is wrong with you.

Could a person with a perfect pitch have ear pain/discomfort when listening to something that is inaccurate?

No. Perfect pitch is an ability to identify note/pitch without a reference note/pitch, that's it. "Wrong" notes should not introduce anything other than "well, this is inaccurate" thought. Besides that digital piano is perfectly tuned so that should not be a problem at all.

I get a sort of minor discomfort and ear "fluttering" when I hear certain frequencies. If the same sounds are surrounded by other sounds, it no longer happens. See if the discomfort stops if you add more background noise to the piano music. Maybe this is why it only happens through headphones for you.

That is a fantastic suggestion, it is entirely possible that my ears get fucked up because the sound through the headphones is far too clean while the sound through the speakers tends to always be "fuzzier" in one way or another, be it a distance effect or reverb.

try playing better

I already know where the middle C is thank you very much.

I used to get something similar when I played some pianos through headphones too. Guitar, synths on computer, drums, never bothered my, just electric keyboard/piano, though not every board did it.

Any idea why some boards did it and some did not? perhaps the boards that did not had a different frequency range or something else about the sound that made it different?

This is just the first thing that I thought of but dynamic range could be a factor. If you adjust the volume to what's comfortable when you're playing at a moderate dynamic, the loudest notes could be much louder than you realize, especially if it's certain frequencies that that you might not be hitting constantly. A compressor would be the easiest solution for this, but if you're using a hardware keyboard you can't do that with software easily. This would kinda suck, but you could adjust the volume to what's comfortable when making the loudest possible noise. I use headphones sitting at my computer all day no problem, but I also do a lot of keyboard programming, and when I'm doing that or using a DAW my ears get worn out very quickly. Yeah this is very true about mids. When I start with raw synthesizers samples on a digital keyboard, they are often way too fucking loud and the ~900 Hz range needs to be practically gutted.

So it may simply come down to having ridiculously uneven sound through headphones which otherwise is much better when using speakers since they are not right next to the eardrum?

I'm not 100% sure about headphones vs speakers but I suspect that this is why keyboards can bother me when my computer audio doesn't. I'm not an audio engineer so I can't tell you if the speakers are actually preventing this from being an issue, but it could be something to look into to make the headphones more comfortable. I do see this happen with speakers as well. I've had the B3 percussion on a Nord keyboard produce some really painful sounds through stage monitors, but it'll be like, one specific note that does it.

Quite surprised this isn't a widely known issue with like an FAQ page or something. Maybe it's very particular only to some people while others do not have too much of an issue in terms of frequency sensitivity.

When I use my digital piano with a good pair of headphones and the volume turned up, especially with organ sounds, it can be slightly uncomfortable if I don't turn the volume down. I still think it's weird that turning it down doesn't seem to help though. I've definitely never had pain from playing piano through headphones, and I do it every day.

So far the possible solutions appear to mainly be: Mixing in intentional interference/background noise Utilizing EQ to cut off or modify certain frequencies utilizing a compressor or some sort of normalization to make the sound more even In my case personally it really does seem to originate from regular piano sounds, the current piano being used does not even have an organ sound I think.