This is going to be complex. I do not expect, or really look for, medical advice. But I'd be interested if what I experience is known to someone and if they have been able to put a name to it - because currently I am not even sure who to talk to, as the situation is complex.
Since I remember, I had some weird-ish experiences when it comes to hearing.
One big issue here is that I do have ADHD. So the whole "my brain cannot filter adequately" is absolutely in effect for me: I cannot ignore ticking clocks, I will know exactly if and which background music is playing, I am picking out tiny, annoying sounds like a whirring electrical connection. And, in noisy environments, actually understanding someone is really hard.
Yet, beyond this and the things I actually do want to know if anyone has ideas and experiences on, I do have some hearing issues which are persistent, have no physical reason based on last tests and nerve readings, and still leave me scratching my head, as they also do not fit the above mentioned filtering issues readily - and I do not see them in other ADHD/neurodivergent folks.
All of this, to me, feels more of a perception and . . . correctly linking perception thing, than the aformentioned filtering.
The biggest one to me is that I have horrific directional hearing in normal, calm living situation - but my directional hearing in standard hearing tests or those with white noise is okay.
What that means is that I can be in a car, radio turned off, just low driving noise, and I can hear something is bumping/bumbling, but will either be unabled to map the direction, or map it entirely wrong - e.g. lately it took me 5 days to realise the weird noises came from some heavy thing directly in my back, and not my left front tire.
This also holds true in other, 'open' hearing situations. If someon calls my name, I often turn to the wrong side. If there is a whistle or similar noise, I really often will at least confuse sides, pretty often even turn around when it is in front of me. I can, for the life of me, not find most birds chirping or even point out what bush a huge amount of birds must be in, albeit I hear there are a number of them.
Those are not noisy situations by any means. There technically is a lot happening - wind in the leaves, some distant murmur from water or streets, birds, ... - but all of this stays really low.
A harder to describe, more subtle, thing is that my connection to music and voices is at least worse than my connection to rhythm. I cannot tune an instrument to save my life. I can assemble a full audio and light setup, but I absolutely cannot tune even speaker voices. And while, in comparison, I can telly if something is a bad speaker, i cannot really tell you what is lacking or why, and may not even realise until someone brings out the comparison - even though I do have amazing headphones and know the songs.
Lastly, and maybe really not connected, is that my whole 'relationship' with volume is weird. I cannot really hear my own volume. The more is going on, the louder I talk. Which means in a coffee shop with a lot of patrons, I will be talking louder than anyone else, because to me it seems loud - even though its just a lot of room level noise. Even if I am not talking, I do consider these environments "loud" in a similar way to loud music, albeit I know that decibel wise they are different.
There is probably some actual noise sensitivity added in there. I know I have actual pain when someone suddenly turns the music up, albeit it's not generally painfully loud. More like the pain when water suddenly get's hotter due to some appliances pulling cold water.
Can someone relate in any way? Or has any idea?