Take a Look at What I Hear - Book Excerpt

Good Listening Acuity skills

Equals remarkable Auditory and physical Coordination

A detailed examination of the

Ability to mentally visualize objects through listening skills and demonstrate their

awareness with mobility techniques from a personal perspective.

By Ronald L Worley Jr.

Around 1970, when I was approximately four years of age, I experienced a rusty nail accident. My brother and I were playing army with a coffee can of rusty nails that we retrieved from a house under construction next door. We were throwing them back and forth over the bed as if they were mistles. I looked up at the right or wrong time, however you wish to look at it, and I was hit by a nail that my brother just tossed. The nail punctured my right eye which led to complete loss of vision in that eye within a few months. Over the next three years or so, secondary glaucoma, by way of a condition called “sympathetic Ophthalmia,” caused a gradual decrease of vision in my left eye. It then was also removed in 2004. So, I learned how to cope with life through most of my formative years as a totally blind person.

My first major achievement was graduating from high school. Afterwards, I used the best of six years to complete two bachelor’s degrees from Tennessee Temple University. In 1991, I went on to complete a master’s degree at Western Michigan University. In 1993, I accepted a job working for Alabama’s Department of Rehabilitation Services where I worked for two years. In January 1996, I accepted a position at the Blind Rehabilitation Center at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Augusta, Georgia. I then retired in 2017 after 22 years of service. Currently, I stay busy by teaching visually impaired users of accessible computers and portable devices. I serve on six blindness-related committees within Georgia.

On December 17 1988, Azalea Ann Allison solidified my proposal of marriage by answering “yes” which began thirty-seven exciting years and going strong. At the time of this writing, we have five strapping boys, whom are all married and blessed us with five daughters-in-law and twelve dearest grandchildren.

I have gathered the following information from more than fifty years as a totally blind person, where I have learned to function in many structured and unstructured environments indoors and out. I received professional orientation training from third grade until ninth grade. I have taken what I have learned and have traveled independently across our country from Buxton, Main to Sandiego, California and from Flint, Michigan to St. Petersburg, Florida. I have traveled by Greyhound Bus, commercial airlines, subways in major cities, Amtrak trains, airport shuttles, personal cabs and many trips with Uber independently.

I would like to dedicate this book to all the mobility instructors who wish to use the knowledge in this book to greatly improve the lives of the visually impaired population.

I also want to dedicate this book to those who desire to function as one without sight and wish to achieve a higher quality of life.

If you’ve had spent any time with a person who is visually impaired, you might have wondered how they can walk between two objects without touching either one, or reached down and place their hands exactly upon a dropped object and pick it up. Yet, other times, they turn around and walk into a wall, table or chair. These skills, or lack thereof, are conditioned by the level of a blind person’s ability to collectively use sound clues, spatial awareness, physical agility, quality of hearing and one’s previous life’s exposures to visualize objects in their environment. Even the best of us who use sound clues at this level can even make mistakes in the interpretation of the sounds or the condition in which they are admitted.

Earlier studies of the life of bats, have coined the term “Echo Location” to the unique ability of visually impaired persons to use refined hearing skills to identify objects in their environment. After considerable thought, I don’t believe this is the sole definition to give this skill. It isn’t only the echo that visually impaired people use for accurate techniques, but the direction of the sound itself. Now I know that sounds do echo, but there is more to it than that. There is the movement of the sound, quality of the sound, its position, at what time it occurs, its distance, and/or the type of sound, that visually impaired people actually use to identify an object. However, I haven’t found much collaboration among various research groups that study sound where they pertain to navigational skills of the visually impaired. Hopefully, the information described in this book, will spark more research interests in this area. My ultimate hope is to provide useful information to: the teachers of the visually impaired (TVI,) mobility instructors, parents, friends, scientists, social workers, counselors, or anyone who seek to assist those who are visually impaired. Who knows, even the military might use this information for their night training excursions.

A lot of information is readily available about the subject of hearing quality, but I haven’t seen much functional depth as it relates to mobility skills. Yes, audiologists can test your hearing based on the pitch and distance that one can hear, but what about the functionality of what is heard by an individual? For example, identified levels of hearing can be confirmed to inform family members that you must speak into grandpa’s left ear, or only female voices will be heard effectively, because he can only hear in the higher pitch range. Also, tests are done to learn the affective range that someone can hear so they can be fitted for hearing aids. But what I am documenting in this book is more of how a person uses what they hear to navigate effectively. I am not going to give much attention to the scientific properties of sound or at what level a person can hear a sound, but rather what information one gathers from a sound, how it is processed and how it can be used to simplify a visually impaired person’s daily life. Good levels of hearing are essential for most of the techniques mentioned in this writing; and if the following sound characteristics are applied, successful mobility skills would only improve. I will discuss the methods of identifying sounds, localizing them, making navigational decisions accordingly and reacting to those sounds.

I myself, as explained above have been totally blind for over fifty years, and have used sounds to achieve more tasks than some persons with average sight. By no means am I trying to make myself out to be a super human, or to imply there is a special elect of people who can perform this type of hearing because people with, so called average sight, are able to use this information just as effectively like my mom. I couldn’t get away with anything! However, because gathering environmental data through vision is immediate, and, very little major process is needed if any, feedback and understanding happens more quickly through visual stimuli and hearing takes a back seat to the data gathering process. There are situations where one’s ability to Hear effectively and functionally may need to be increased if he/she has a job that requires those skills like the special forces in the military.

Have you heard the phrase, “I know you heard me; but are you listening.” The definition of hearing used in this book, is mainly one’s ability to hear noises. “Listening Acuity” is a term that I have coined which best explains the level of how a visually impaired person, in their mind’s eye, visualizes their environment by recognizing the characteristics, meanings and functions of various sounds enabling them to successfully act or react physically. In this document I intend to provide the building blocks of various types of sound patterns. I categorize sounds in three major groups, but I label sounds in their own section by their sound patterns. For easy reference, definitions of each are in a glossary at the end of this book. In short, sounds can be used to navigate, react or gather information. These tasks include adjusting my body when speaking to someone, perceiving my environment to travel, making decisions, playing sports, or avoiding danger just to name a few.

Some sounds have unusual characteristics which serve as an aid to Listening Acuity. Within each unique sound I list, I will state the functional concept and demonstrate how visually impaired individuals might be able to use them to their advantage. So, let’s get started.

(Disclaimer: Because my methods are derived from personal experience, other visually impaired travelers may not perceive the defined concepts that I write about from a personal perspective but by no means, are they disqualified as valid functions or conditions. Maybe what I am writing about has not been completely and thoroughly documented scientifically as of yet.)

Visual Hearing

Listening to the world’s whispers unfold,
Where sounds, stories and secrets are told.
A hidden language that ears softly trace,
The art, of hearing’s curious embrace.
From the leaves of waving trees,
a melody carries in the breeze.
To the sound of consistent footfalls,
Which echo off various objects and walls.
To hear a heartbeat in a crowded room,
or sense a smile in the darkened gloom.
So is, listening beyond the spoken word,
A deeper truth when silence is heard.
Being attuned to the echoes and noise,
We find comfort in many joys.
In every sound, a story we behold,
So, with listening, we discover life’s gold.
By Ronald L Worley Jr.

As a blind person, sounds are an integral part of my life, and I am sure that it is the same for almost every visually impaired person and even every sighted individual. Sounds are used to determine what is going on around us. We use sounds to cook, clean, navigate, communicate, play with children, engage in sports, avoid danger, and much, much more. In our society, I would guess about 80% of life’s interaction, is centered around the visual sense. Vision is so readily easy and dependable, most people are confused and struggle with having to use hearing for the same activity if possible. However, the more one can use accurate listening, the less they will need to rely on vision if affective training and exposure are increased. Needless to say, the more one is able to use sound in a functional way, the more independent they can be in their daily lives.

Now let’s think about how sound travels. Sounds will either travel outwards from the person making the noise, echoing off objects and coming back to them, or the sound will come from another source to the person listening if sounds are in one’s range of hearing. This book describes both conditions and what can interfere with interpreting those sounds.

In short, direct sound is a term that I use for any sound when a nonmoving entity, other than yourself, is making a sound and it travels in a straight line directly to your ears without anything between you and the object making the sound. It could come from all three-dimensional directions in reference to your ears. For example, if you are sitting on the couch and you are watching a show on TV, unless someone is standing in front of you, there will be nothing between you and the TV. The TV speakers are making the sound, which is traveling directly to your ears. This is a common example of direct sound. Believe it or not, the most common sounds around us, even when we sleep, are direct sounds. Other sounds that might be common in our homes would be a running box fan, a ceiling fan or air conditioning vent, a person talking or a radio playing.

In a simple example, my boys will knock on an object to give me a directional clue to walk toward. Often times, if I don’t have my cellphone with me, I will hear it ringing and I will need to follow the sound while walking toward it, until I can reach out and find it. In an outside environment, my wife would drop me off at O’Reilly’s Auto Parts, a doctor’s appointment or some other place where I would go in by myself. When I come back out, I would use the sound of our vehicle’s engine to make my way back to the car. Obviously, I would have needed to learn the sound of our car. If my wife would move from where she dropped me off, she would either start the car so I could hear the engine or she would toot the horn to give me a direction. If there is a lot of noise, she will either toot again or open the window to give me verbal instructions. Although, her voice would be speaking directly to me, the sound of other cars could make it hard for me to get a localizing sound to find the car exactly. More on that later.

An extremely unique example where I used my keen hearing to localize a direct sound, was in Flint, Michigan, where I grew up. We learned that we could water the lawn really well around 8:00 p.m. and go back out around midnight to find night crawlers that had come out of the ground. We would catch them so we could use them for fishing bait the following day. My brother would normally be the one to go out most of the time to catch the potential bait.

One particular night, I went out with my dad. He used a flashlight to locate each large worm. Then would use his toe to pinch off the hole so the worm couldn’t slither back into it. My dad would then grab the worm and put it into the bucket I was holding. It was then that I found that I could hear the worm as it was flickering in the grass. When I heard a flicker, I would point to it, and my dad would find the worm with his flashlight and retrieve it. We were able to go fishing the next day, and I was glad to have helped.

It was pretty hard to focus on the grass where the worm was and block out all of the other night sounds like crickets or traffic in the distance. I could do it then, but not at all now!

See Part 7, Appendix A, for examples on how to train this skill.