Until I lost much of my hearing overnight two years ago, I had excellent pitch. My brother and I grew up around music, and both of us could always carry a tune. My dad is a gifted, self-taught piano player whose range spans from Chopin Sonatas to Ragtime to English Music Hall favorites. I took piano lessons, played in the school band and sang in the school chorus. I had enough formal and informal education to appreciate all kinds of music and at different stages of my life was enamored of many different forms — rock and roll, classical, Top 40, jazz, you name it. But on the day of my sudden hearing loss, I discovered that music had become completely unintelligible to me. My daughter Lexy was taking her piano lesson, and from the next room all I could hear was a faint tinkling sound. When I put my ear close to the piano, the sounds it made horrified me.
Our beautiful baby-grand Steinway, a recently reconditioned heirloom from Barbara’s grandfather, suddenly sounded to me like an untuned honky-tonk piano with a stuck “mute” pedal. It made me recall the time many years ago when we draped a metal key chain over the piano wires in my dad’s piano, which gave the notes a very funky, tinny sound, like an untuned harpsichord. Now, the piano in my own living room seemed to be making similar strange noises, but much quieter, and completely discordant. When I tried to play a simple eight-note scale, starting at Middle C, each note each seemed to have an entirely new and different pitch. Instead of the usual orderly sequence, each successive note struck a higher pitch than it should have. The effect of this distortion was to stretch the scale to a range of an octave and a half, with High C sounding to my new ears something closer to an F or an A in the next octave up. But then in that next octave several of the notes sounded to me like they dropped to below Middle C. It was bizarre, and frightening.
The result is that any kind of music now sounds perfectly awful to me. If I listen with my highly amplified hearing aids, it’s unbearable noise. In fact, the louder it is played the worse it sounds, to the point where it’s physically painful. And any kind of music, live or recorded, whether it’s playing in someone’s home, in a public place like a restaurant, or on the car radio, creates a masking effect making it impossible for me to understand spoken conversation at the same time, even when I’m using my directional hearing aids.
One of the interesting things about hearing is that everyone’s is different. Two people’s audiograms charting their ears’ ability to hear at certain volume and frequency levels may be exactly the same. But comprehension tests of spoken words might show wildly varying results. To people with hearing loss, these differences are crucial, because some are able to use amplification to understand speech or enjoy music quite well, while others are completely unable to discern speech or, in my case, hear music.
I read somewhere that Vincent Van Gogh not only had wonderful, mystic, spiritual visions that inspired his paintings, but that his actual physical vision was superhuman. His eyesight was enhanced in such a way that he physically perceived colors as brighter, more vibrant, and more alive than what mere mortals see, who are seemingly color-blind by comparison. From what I’ve learned, differences in hearing among individuals work in a similar way. Some people’s hearing mechanisms transmit sounds more accurately than other people’s. Some people suffer from different degrees of tinnitus, or noises in the ears, that can impede comprehension. Damage to hearing nerves can distort sounds heard at different frequencies. Most important, people’s brains are all wired in their own unique ways and simply process sound differently. That’s why some people can have good or even “perfect” pitch, while others with perfectly normal and health hearing organs are essentially “tone deaf.”
So when I look back at my god-given ability to make and enjoy music throughout most of my life, I can be thankful for what I had for so long, something which many people never get to experience so well. And there is other good news. Even though I can’t hear music with my ears any more, I can still hear it in my head. If you’ve ever had a day where you couldn’t get a tune out of your head, you know it’s possible to recall music in your head, from your memory. I always wondered how Beethoven was able to continue composing symphonies after his hearing loss, but now it’s quite clear to me. If I can imagine “Row-Row-Row Your Boat” in my head, and can even remember it and play it back nearly exactly when sung as a “round,” then I can imagine a musical genius like Beethoven continuing to compose entire symphonies in his brain.
But of all the losses that came with my sudden severe hearing impairment, loss of music remains the most profound. In 1989 I saw Miles Davis perform at the open-air theater in Berkley, California. It was an all-electronic group playing the latest dissonant avant-garde jazz. Not much of it made sense to me, and I admitted at the time that I didn’t “get” it. But I was swept away by the momentum and energy of the performance that he improvised and orchestrated, with its sense of story and intiuitive beginning, middle and triumphant end. After that I picked up my first copy of “Kind of Blue,” his classic jazz breakthrough disc, and all of a sudden it all started to make sense to me. A whole new world of understanding — of music, of jazz, of creativity and creation, of life — opened to me. Over the next decade I worked my way through his entire collection, which led me to further understanding and enjoyment of many other forms of music and creative expression that Miles Davis influenced. When it became clear to me the music would never return, that something which I had taken for granted as it infused my life with so much joy and revelation would be gone forever, it was a cruel theft and violation of my humanity. I’ll mourn the loss to the day I die.