My Story
The Noises That Inhabit My Head
Sometimes I still hear the insistent screeching, like an angry flock of birds or the screaming of the wind in a hurricane. It’s the same unearthly noise that millions of bat-like creatures made as they swarmed out of the open gates of hell in a horror movie I saw once. But now the noise only creeps in at the edges of my consciousness during quiet moments, like a barely remembered bad dream. It’s one of the many strange sounds in my head that have come and gone since the day I woke up with severe hearing loss several years ago.
On that day, though I could barely hear in the real world, I awoke to a cacophony in my head. I’ve since learned these sounds were a side effect from the kind of sudden hearing loss I encountered. They were different and louder than the tinitus, or ringing in the ears, that I had always lived with. It was not painful, but it was very distracting. It was as if a loud construction site was outside my window, with jack hammers, dump trucks and other heavy machinery going at full volume. These noises receded in the first several months after the hearing loss, but as they settled into a constant background presence, others came to the fore, which collectively created a never-ending and constantly changing symphony of sound.
One noise, a familiar high-pitched whine, comes and goes. It took me a while to recognize what it reminded me of, but then I realized it’s exactly like someone working with a gasoline-powered chain saw on a tree somewhere in the neighborhood, with the whine rising and falling as the saw works its way through the wood, then occasionaly dropping down to a much lower pitch as it idles when the blade chain isn’t engaged. Another sound, which maintains a constant pitch and volume day and night, is equally familiar and took me nearly as long to place. If you’re my age, you may have watched Sky King, one of the early weekly dramas in the 1950s that helped usher out TV’s Golden Age. My main memory is of the hero always in trouble as he piloted his two-engine prop over Texas, radioing his assistant Penny who was by turns cool as a cucumber and mortally terrified. In the background you would hear the constant high-pitched hummmmmmm of the plane’s engines. The hum never seemed to end and in fact got in the way of my enjoyment of the show. It’s the same sound effect 1950s movies about World War II fighter pilots used.
These noises join a number of others. All seem to reside somewhere in the middle of my head. More gravitate toward the left side, where my hearing is much worse, but if I concentrate hard I can isolate which noises seem to emanate from what ear. In addition to the airplane engine that is a constant on the left side, and the chain-saw whine that comes and goes on the right side, there is an ongoing, high-pitched “hissing” on both sides that is like the tinnitus noise I always experienced, but much louder. Then, on the left again, there is a not-unpleasant bubbling exactly like the sound an air-filter pump makes in a small tropical fish tank. There is also a steady buzzing like the loud electrical hum you hear from a transformer on a telephone pole when you’re walking down a quiet country lane on a hot summer day.
I’m told the noises are after-effects from the damage my hearing nerves suffered when excess fluid from my Meniere’s disease created pressure in my inner ears, and when my auto-immune system went haywire and dispatched anti-bodies to attack them. My otolaryngologist (an ear, nose and throat specialist who is also a surgeon) told me my injured hearing organs are much like an aging football player’s arthritic knees. Every once in a while, the old injuries will act up, there will be a little swelling, and the sounds in my head will get louder. I liked this analogy because it sounded somewhat macho. But the problem with damage to your inner ears is that, unlike your knees, there’s not a heck of a lot of room for swelling in there. So it doesn’t take much of a change in the weather, the onset of allergy season or more than a touch of a common cold for the noises in my head to start acting up.
There is one more effect I’ve experienced from the sounds in my head. I hesitate to mention it because it’s so strange. For over a year after my sudden hearing loss, I heard a musical chord that played constantly, like an organ that was stuck. The chord’s key would change occasionally in discernible ways; I could even hum the various notes of the chord in whatever key my brain had set it to play that day. It was very, very weird and more than a little unsettling, but at least the chord always seemed to be in tune and harmonious. (It was unlike my experience with music generated in the real world, which was and remains a complete discordant jumble of noise because of the distortion of my hearing). After living with this musical chord for several months, I discovered that if I used a strange filtering trick I found my brain could play, I was able to physically select the tones that I would hear most loudly and suppress the others, and thereby “play” simple songs in my head. This wasn’t the familiar process of humming to oneself or remembering a tune. It was using the real sounds in my head to make actual music that my inner ear would generate and my brain would hear. One morning I played God Bless America successfully from beginning to end, using this newly learned trick of filtering and calibrating the music in my ears to specific tones. I played it several times.
But then, to my horror, I couldn’t turn the song off. It repeated itself constantly throughout the day, and in quiet moments it was the most prominent thing I heard. God Bless America continued playing into the next morning before I finally figured out how to turn it off. By thinking hard about a complicated Bach fugue my father used to play on the piano, I was able to program my brain to replace God Bless America with the most prominent of the four melodies in the fugue. For a while, my brain got stuck repeating the new melody. But when I tried to direct the musical tones in my head to intertwine the four tunes in the fugue in the way Bach had written it, the music became scrambled for a short time, then locked back into the familiar chord. All I can figure is that my futile attempt to recreate the fugue had somehow disrupted the endless cycle. Bach’s complex composition had overwhelmed the capacity of my brain to fully comprehend it, as it has so many others over the centuries. Thankfully the chord receded in prominence in the first year after my sudden hearing loss. I can still occasionally program tunes in my head, but the chord is much less intrusive than it was. It remains one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced.
I’ve done a lot of reading on tinnitus and the other noises that the hearing organs spontaneously generate in the brain. Unfortunately, about all I’ve learned is that there is precious little known or understood about the whys and hows of this effect. I suppose it’s awfully hard to study something that in many instances can only be described by the person experiencing the phenomenon. Because the noise resides entirely in the brain, it must be difficult if not impossible to isolate and measure with today’s diagnostic equipment. But my quest for understanding will continue. I would love to hear from other people who’ve had their own experiences with the noises that inhabit their heads.
My Story: The Day the Music Died
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.
