Hey everyone. I finally got this down, explaining sensitive hearing the best I can, through an objective and subjective points, relating to Athena Cykes. I really wanted to write this because I have sensitive hearing myself, so I feel like I can relate to this character on a very personal level. A lot of the subjective things are my own experience with sensitive hearing and having it compared to Athena Cykes’ hearing. So anybody else who does have sensitive hearing in real life would have a different experience, compared to my own. Because I am revealing some personal information about myself so there’s something to compare to Athena Cykes’ experiences, it does put a piece of myself in the analysis. It may be eye opening for some people that hearing sensitivity can really affect someone drastically in their life. Other than that, I hope you all enjoy this!

In the latest Ace Attorney game, a new character called Athena Cykes was introduced. Her special ability is sensitive hearing, in particular, hearing the emotions in people’s voices that the average person cannot pick up. She uses this ability to help said person give a clear and rational testimony, allowing herself and her partners, Phoenix and Apollo to be able to cross-examine the person’s testimony. This ability itself made me very interested in her, having sensitive hearing myself and suffering from it for as long as I can remember. I’ll be going over what exactly sensitive hearing is, having comparisons between Athena’s sensitive hearing and my own, and determining how realistic it is to real life.



This analysis does contain major spoilers in Dual Destinies, specifically around Athena Cykes.





So, sensitive hearing is generally defined as noise that causes discomfort and/or pain to the person, usually loud noises. The more scientific term for sensitive hearing is called hyperacusis. It can be acquired through working in a noisy environment or after having an ear operation. Although, some people are born with sensitive hearing, such as myself. Each person’s sensitive hearing is different in severity, but there are also aspects of one’s hearing that are more attuned to some areas more than others. For me, I can pick up distant noises/voices and hear everything that’s background sound. In the case of Athena Cykes, she was born with sensitive hearing and is discomforted by picking up the emotions in people’s voices, which she hears louder than the average person.



Living with sensitive hearing is both a gift and a curse to whoever is affected by it. The biggest advantage of it is being more aware of your surroundings, like hearing faint footsteps or a distant voice and knowing exactly how far away they are. In The Monstrous Turnabout, Athena shows this in action, when she picks up Detective Fulbright returning to the scene of the crime they’re investigating, hearing him THROUGH THE AIR DUCTS.



Athena: Hey Apollo… Do you hear something?

Apollo: Hm? ……… I don’t hear anything.

Athena: Oh, right. Your hearing must not be as sensitive as mine.

Apollo: Um, what are you talking about?

Athena: A whooshing sound, like wind rushing through a narrow strait. And the echo of someone’s voice… “In… In…”

Fulbright: IN JUSTICE WE TRUST!

Athena: Aaaaaaaah!

Fulbright: Ha ha ha! Someone’s got a sharp set of ears! That was the sound of my righteous voice reverberating through the air duct!



Athena’s sensitive hearing is not limited to the emotions in people’s voices, as she’s capable hearing Fulbright’s voice through an air duct from quite a good distance away from the room. It’s quite possible that any person affected with sensitive hearing, provided they are aware of their surroundings, know where sounds/voices are coming from, even if the average person is not even aware of these noises.



Later in the same case, Athena also shows some distress of loud noises, which is common for those who have sensitive hearing. In particular, when she and Apollo open the door to the Forbidden Chamber. Apollo shows no problem with opening the door, and half-heartedly jokes about it. But Athena on the other hand, finds the doors creaking to be much louder than Apollo.



Apollo: These doors need some serious oil.

Athena: Aaah! That was like nails on a chalkboard!

Apollo: Oh, right. Forgot about those super good ears of yours.



Even if it is as simple as a creaky door, a lot of sounds to people with sensitive hearing are a lot louder than what the average person hears them as. From living with sensitive hearing, I can pick up the sound of my watch ticking from a metre or two away from me, while my friends and family cannot hear the watch ticking unless they put their ear up to it. So Athena describing the sound of an old creaking door as nails on a chalkboard is accurate for somebody with sensitive ears.

So it was a little disappointing that the villains of Ace Attorney 5/Dual Destinies who were aware of Athena’s sensitive hearing didn’t exploit it to stop her from doing her job. Sensitive hearing is both a strength and a weakness, where the person can hear the quietest of sounds but cannot handle too much noise/high pitched noises.



But let’s get to the serious stuff, where sound sensitivity affects a person’s quality of life. Living with sensitive hearing really messes with a person’s life, as they are limited to certain jobs and social events in their social lives. For me currently, I cannot use a lawn mower or a vacuum cleaner. They are too loud and I cannot use them without covering my ears, even if I’m wearing earplugs. I also can’t go social events where the acoustics of the room are bad, if there are too many windows in the venue, and if the music is out of tune or too high pitched (or there’s no bass guitar). This means parties with music blasting out the speakers were out of the question for me. There are methods I use to cope though, to make it possible to go to these social events. At my brother’s high school graduation, held in a pretty noisy reception area, I used my sensitive hearing to pick up the bass guitar playing in the background. I focused my hearing to the sounds made by the bass guitar, and I could stay and enjoy my brother’s celebration, even dance near the speakers.



When I was a child though, my sensitive hearing was a lot worse than it is now. I couldn’t be in a classroom with noisy kids some days and often suffered from headaches. Not to mention I was unable to take music class because the instruments used were too high pitched and wasn’t able to learn an instrument until I was 18 years old. That instrument, was bass guitar.

With Athena (as a child), her sensitive hearing was so bad that she had to skip many days of school and was mostly confined to her home, the Space Center, until her mother made special headphones that helped her. Because she was confined to the Space Centre most days, her only friends were Juniper, Simon, Ponco and Clonco, only two of them were human. This severely limited her social life and had a negative impact on her social skills, because her sensitive ears were part of what made her reserved and quiet.

What helped me overcome my sensitivity so I didn’t get sensory overload from normal noises such as people in shopping centres and working with noise in the classroom was a special program done by an audiologist. After testing to find out which frequencies I was the most sensitive to, she made me listen to music through headphones at a certain frequency for an hour twice a day during my school holidays for five years. Despite that my head did hurt and the treatment drained a lot of energy, it allowed me to be able to sit in the classroom with the other children and I could go out to places and not be overloaded with the noise in the background. Simply put, my sensitive hearing was desensitized so I could live a normal life, but I still have sensitive hearing and what I hear is still louder than the average person, but it’s bearable.

Does this sound familiar? It should, because Athena Cykes went through a similar treatment to my own.

Blackquill: Do you remember those headphones you hated so much?

Athena: Yes… my head hurt every time I wore them.

Blackquill: No, Athena, it’s just the opposite. They emitted sound waves to nullify emotional input from the voices of people around you. Your power was much stronger then than it is now. And those headphones were what enabled you to carry on with everyday life.

When Metis Cykes made these headphones for her daughter, the intention was to dampen the input in the environment around her, so Athena can live a normal life. Sensitive hearing cannot be completely cured, and it always will be with the person the moment they acquire it. Athena had to wear them at every waking moment (despite Athena herself saying “I had to wear them when I went out” and she was shown wearing them in her home, the Space Centre) and she was in pain because exposure to the sound waves (I’m assuming they were at a certain frequency) causes a lot of headaches and pains. But ultimately they help desensitizing sounds, and the pain she suffered indicated that the headphones were working as intended.

The last thing I actually want to point out is how people with sensitive hearing react when under a lot of stress/pressure or are very emotional from the environment around them. When things do get too much for me, I cover my ears with my hands and lower my head. For me, my hearing is the sense that receives most information of my surroundings. So when I cover my ears, I’m attempting to block out most of the sensory information I’m receiving because it’s too much and I’m under a lot of stress or experiencing a lot of emotions.

What does Athena do when she’s remembering the most traumatic memory of her life and determining the identity of the person who killed her mother?

She blocks her ears with her hands, because that’s how people with sensitive hearing block out sensory information. Not only that, she doesn’t even close her eyes even though this is something she witnessed as a child. This is an amazing animation sprite that shows how people with hearing sensitivity deal with sensory or emotional information that is too much from them.

Despite different levels of hearing sensitivity experienced by an individual, Ace Attorney has done a fantastic job accurately showing how a person living with hearing sensitivity reacts to stimulus with and without treatment. I cannot describe how happy I am seeing how much Athena’s life and reactions relate to my own in regards to sensitive hearing.

I hope that in the next game, that we get more of a glimpse of Athena in her early teenage years, just after her treatment to see how she improves her quality of life. There was only a tiny bit of dialogue about it, but it is so important to her character development and how she became the woman we see in Dual Destinies. I also want to see some characters/villains taking advantage of Athena’s hearing sensitivity, because it is still present with Athena and she has shown she is sensitive to loud stimuli.

I’m looking forward to what the next games does with Athena Cykes and her special ears, because the Ace Attorney team did an excellent job at researching those people who are affected by it and the treatments that can reduce hearing sensitivity.

EDIT (because I found something new and important): When Athena experiences discord, it is shown as a high frequency sound that makes her pay special attention to the emotion that is causing it. It is something out of place and sounds ‘wrong’ to her. When the discord/noise is eliminated, everything is better for her and the truth is clear. Surprisingly, this is pretty accurate to someone with sensitive hearing. High frequency noises are what people with sensitive hearing pick up as wrong and out of place, that is because it hurts their ears and they can experience sensory overload from hearing it too much. The reason why people with sensitive hearing take notice of it in particular over other sounds is because it is the cause their suffering and they want to remove the unwanted stimulus from their environment as soon as they can.