The world is rich with sound — birdsong, rainfall, children playing in a park, traffic on a busy street, a crowd cheering at a sporting event. But for some people, rather than enriching life, sound can make life nigh unbearable.
A condition called hyperacusis, sometimes called sound sensitivity, is a rare hearing disorder in which sounds that typically don’t bother most people seem particularly loud and uncomfortable. Some common sounds that are unbearable to people with hyperacusis are water running in a sink and people having a conversation.
To people without the condition, the sound of pages being turned in a book or the humming of a refrigerator may go unnoticed, but for people who suffer from hyperacusis, these same sounds seem intolerably loud.
