I was a bit off
colour. More languid than I normally am first thing in
the morning. My head felt denser than usual, as if it
had been filled overnight with sand. But it was my turn
to make the tea, so I rolled over and ... pffff. One ear
gone.Then, as I sat up, I kept on going past the point
of perpendicularity, like a Weeble. The room swam. The
Ps and Fs in my ear grew louder. I felt sick.
Sudden neurosensory hearing loss (SNHL) is called that
because they can't think of anything better to call it.
This is because they don't really know what it is. What
is known is its effect: hearing is taken away suddenly
and the victim loses all sense of balance. Any movement
results in acute vertigo and vomiting. You can lose vision,
too. The most likely causes are either viral or vascular,
resulting in the denial of blood to important bits of
neural kit. Permanent damage is inflicted on the tiny
hair cells or cilia in the inner ear, which are vital
conductors of auditory information to the brain. Once
torched, they don't grow back. SNHL is really quite calamitous.
An hour after the first attack, when my wife and two children
carried me deaf, blind, immobile, nauseous and incoherent
into the doctor's surgery, my GP's first thought was that
I had a brain tumour. In hospital an MRI scan revealed
nothing. "Sit tight," they said.
"But my hearing is my favourite sense. I need ears
for work. Music is my great passion in life: I write about
it and I do it a bit too. I'd rather lose an eye, a foot
..."
"We don't guarantee that hearing will return,"
the surgeon replied. "But don't worry. It may."
He then sidestepped his own sidestep. "Anyway, lots
of people live perfectly normal lives with only one ear."
I emerged from hospital a week later, profoundly deaf
in one ear, my brain refusing to let my ear go quietly.
Its reaction is to fill my head with noise. Imagine the
sound of pressurised air escaping from a central heating
valve. That's the sound that fills the right hemisphere
of my head round the clock. Concealed within that hissy
cloud there's another layer of far subtler sounds. In
the dead of night, when my wife is breathing silently
and there is no other sound going in my good ear, I can
hear beneath the pfffff a strange polyphony of whistles
and cries, like a drowning choir, accompanied by a tiny
monkey playing a teeny pipe organ. It can be quite soothing.
But if my wife suddenly exhales through her nose, or rustles
the duvet by moving her head slightly, then all hell breaks
loose. I hear gasping cats and boiling kettles. When two
or more voices are joined together in amiable conversation,
I hear trains entering underground stations. Right now,
sitting at my computer in an otherwise silent house, the
minuscule hum of the machine is at a pitch somewhere between
the central-heating pffff and the cat's gasp.
This is not conventional tinnitus, but entirely reactive
to input in the good ear. It is the auditory equivalent
of the illusion experienced by amputees - the feeling
that the missing limb is still attached. My brain is generating
sound to compensate for the lack of auditory activity
in my ear.
So where does that leave music? It leaves music pretty
much nowhere. Put it this way: I can hear music but I
can't listen to it, not for pleasure. What I can hear
is monophonic, on the far side of whatever uproar happens
to be filling my head. Music is merely a sound. It is
not, for me, the same thing that it was for a good 40
of my 47 years, right up until the end of August.
I don't know how you hear music. I imagine that if you
like music at all then it has, in your head, some kind
of third dimension to it, a dimension suggesting space
as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture.
Speaking for myself, I used to hear "buildings"...
three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and
tension. I did not "see" these buildings in
the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These
forms had "floors", "walls", "roofs",
"windows", "cellars". They expressed
volume. Music to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional
container, a vessel, as real in its way as a Scout hut
or a cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside
and subdivided internal spaces.
I'm absolutely certain that this "architecture"
had everything to do with why music has always exerted
such a hold over me. I think music was the structure in
which I learned to contain and then examine emotion.
I've always kept quiet about this architecture business,
partly because it sounds pretentious and even slightly
self-congratulatory (you hear Amy Winehouse, I hear Apsley
House), but also because I'd never been entirely confident
that "architecture" was what I really meant.
Maybe "hearing music architecturally" was just
me being inarticulate.
But I am confident now. "Architecturally" was
precisely right. What I hear now when I listen to music
is a flat, two-dimensional representation. Where I used
to get buildings, I now only get architectural drawings.
I can interpret what the drawings show, but I don't get
the actual structure: I can't enter music and I can't
perceive its inner spaces. I've never got much of an emotional
hit from technical drawings. Here is what really hurts:
I no longer respond to music emotionally.
The celebrated neurologist and author Oliver Sacks has
recently published a book, Musicophilia, all about the
relationship between the brain and music. In it he tells
the story of a Dr Jorgensen who lost all hearing in one
ear following an operation on a nerve. He, like me, afterwards
found music as flat and unengaging as a line drawing.
Dr Jorgensen did not get the tinnitus, however. He enjoyed
blissful silence in his duff ear. Yet music for him remained
steadfastly flat.
Jorgensen wrote to Sacks to tell his story and to pass
on the interesting information that, counter to all logic,
after about six months' dogged listening, he fancied that
his single ear was beginning to offer him a "pseudostereo
effect", giving him "ample compensation"
for the loss of real stereo. He speculated on the possibility
of his brain doing a bit of surreptitious rewiring: "Hearing
fibres might have crossed in the corpus callosum to receive
input from my functioning left ear ..."
Sacks is doubtful about the extent of such rewiring, but
goes on to ruminate on what might be expected of a brain
in such circumstances, not least with regard to the brain's
capacity to register "space" in music as an
active element in its emotional reach. He talks about
the "recruitment" of different brain areas not
normally used for the purpose.
I began to do little experiments on myself. I dared not
listen to my favourite music for fear of what I might
hear (imagine: Miles Davis as a papery squiggle), but
I kept up a steady drip of new and potentially interesting
(quiet) music into my one good ear, on the off chance
that something desirable might happen. And on November
11 I tottered downstairs to watch the Remembrance Day
broadcast at the Cenotaph.
I am always affected by the Cenotaph ritual, in particular
the Guards' stacked Nimrod, followed by When I Am Laid
in Earth (from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas) and Beethoven's
Funeral March: grey greatcoats, deep trombones, utter
stillness. Gets me every single time. Every year I watch
and wait for Nimrod's unfailing impact on my metabolism,
fascinated by the serpentine passage of emotion through
my body, from its bed in the pit of my stomach, slow as
a Guardsman's dead march. It's an extraordinary sensation,
made all the more so because of its complete and utter
predictability.
So I switched on and sat there. What if nothing happened?
I needn't have worried. David Dimbleby had only to intone,
"And now, from Elgar's Enigma Variations ..."
and, before a single Guardsman had so much as licked his
mouthpiece, I was a mess.
Yes, of course, I was snivelling for my lost cilia. But
also, quite clearly, my psyche was not going to run the
risk of me being unable to feel a thing in the face of
stick-on emotional music. But that wasn't the interesting
thing. What was really interesting was that, as I sat
there shuddering and trickling, I began to hear the music
better. Melody, metre, a little bit of timbre, the puffiest
cloud of harmony. Yes, yes ... I began to sense the tiniest
swelling of architectural form in my head. You wouldn't
have called it the Taj Mahal, but equally, this was no
papery squiggle.
When it was over, I stuck the Purcell on my stereo. I
thought: if I'm getting that much from the TV, what am
I going to get from a good recording coming out of big
speakers? I only got discomfort and bewilderment. The
music was close to unreadable. It was certainly unbearable.
I turned it off and let the uproar in my head subside.
Oliver Sacks was in London a week or two later, talking
about his book. He kindly agreed to meet. We sat in the
foyer of his hotel and he listened, kindly and attentively,
taking notes. He seemed interested by the Cenotaph experience
and my uncooked theory of music-as-emotional-petri-dish.
He then told me that he'd recently lost the sight in one
eye and that it had broken his heart.
Sacks has maintained a lifelong fascination with, and
experimental expertise in, the subject of stereoscopy.
He has tinkered with the science and the showmanship of
seeing with two eyes since the 30s and has developed an
almost metaphysical affection for the way stereoscopy
makes the world lovable, as well as livable in. He pointed
a thumb out of the window of the breakfast bar and drew
my attention to the thick, shifting foliage on the other
side of the glass. "Beforehand," he said, "I
would take active pleasure in the movements of tricky
jungle surfaces, and the way we perceive depth and distinctiveness
in the most complex visual environments. But now,"
he hesitated, obviously not wanting to labour the point,
"everything's rather flat."
The Monophone and the Monoscope felt each other's pain
and agreed to correspond.
A few days later I tottered off to watch a preview of
the Led Zeppelin concert film The Song Remains the Same,
which was coming out on DVD with remastered sound. It's
a daft film but I am fond of it, and it seemed an ideal
opportunity to test a couple of things: the significance
of familiarity in any emotional response to music, and
whether there was anything in the vague feeling carried
over from the Cenotaph that seeing the music helped with
the process of hearing it. (I know what you're thinking:
Led Zeppelin? Emotion? What kind of weirdo are you? But
the fact is, I have always got a lot of emotional pleasure
from Led Zeppelin, a pleasure that is, I suspect, not
unakin to Sacks's pleasure in the shifting of jungle foliage.)
Crash bang wallop. I lasted three songs and had to leave
the cinema clutching my head in a state of disorientation.
The reactive tinnitus took me close to the threshold of
actual physical pain. Great swaths of the music were simply
unreadable. Jimmy Page's guitar, in particular, was a
storm of detuned noise.
I sent an email to Daniel J Levitin, musician, neuroscientist
and the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, to see
what he thought. I explained about the flatness, the absence
of warmth and timbre. This is what he said: "We don't
know much about those higher-order qualities. I know about
them as a recording engineer and producer, but not as
a scientist. I suspect that something has gone awry in
the inner ear and so the cortex isn't getting all the
information it's accustomed to. In the case of pitch,
the brain can fill in the missing information, but with
those higher-order properties not."
So there it is. I can make analytical "sense"
of music most of the time because my brain can compensate
for any loss of pitch, which is the very first quality
that differentiates music from pneumatic drills and bickering
children. What my brain can't seem to do is fill in the
timbre, warmth, texture and depth - what Levitin calls
the higher-order qualities.
Does this mean that it is the higher-order qualities that
generate the emotional response to music? Or is it just
me? Does it merely mean that in order for me to be able
to register music's architectural dimension - and therefore
have a special place in which to register emotion - I
need warmth, timbre, texture and depth? This might explain
why, if I listen hard to music in my new condition, I
feel perfectly capable of making aesthetic judgments,
even as I feel nothing much at all at the emotional level.
A week or two later I had a kindly letter from Oliver
Sacks, enclosing a copy of a piece he wrote for the New
Yorker, Stereo Sue, about a woman who had "acquired
stereoscopy after almost half a century of being stereo-blind".
It was, she said, "a constant source of delight".
The neurological basis of Sue's transformation was by
no means clear, but the impact of it was abundantly so.
Stereo Sue described to Sacks the effect of being "inside"
a snowfall for the first time, because she was able now
to see it shifting and flowing around her in three dimensions,
as opposed to "looking in on it", as she had
done all her life. "I watched the snow fall for several
minutes, and, as I watched, I was overcome with a deep
sense of joy." She might have been describing how
I used to feel when I listened to John Coltrane or Marvin
Gaye or the St Matthew Passion or, for that matter, Led
Zeppelin. I used to inhabit all of them, as they inhabited
me, in three-dimensional space. Now I only look in.
Sacks was particularly engaged by my Cenotaph episode.
"What you say about the power of emotion to restore
a sense of depth and spaciousness (to music) is extremely
interesting," he wrote. "You must have (and
will always have) the memory of such spaciousness, and
the power to evoke it in imagination - and 'imagination'
imagery is neurologically almost equivalent to perception.
One might expect that such a power, while not available
(or less available) voluntarily, could occur spontaneously
by association with emotion, a memory. But you have to
sort this out for yourself." He is currently reading
a book entitled A Singular View: The Art of Seeing With
One Eye.
So I know that the only way forward with this is to keep
listening to music, even though it hurts. The more I listen,
the greater the chance of cortical adaptation, but also
the greater the chance my memory has of helping me to
rediscover the sensation of what music used to do.
After six months, a fair amount of adaptation has already
taken place. I decided to do away with my walking stick
a couple of weeks ago and I now swank around slowly, like
a cowboy without his horse, legs spread. And I have begun
to force myself to share space with other people while
they talk. It isn't easy, but it's easier. It feels like
progress.
But music is still perceived flatly in a sliver of space
on the far side of the noise in my head. It kind of hurts.
I do find, though, that I am learning to "read"
music in a different way. It involves a lot of effort.
Music has always penetrated me effortlessly - that has
been part of my pleasure in it. Its power to get inside,
to saturate, has been its greatest power. And in response
I have always been delighted to be the passive recipient.
But that doesn't work any more. I now have to fight to
hear music: to resist the discomfort that arises from
listening and to clear the space in my head for music
to have some wriggle room - and of course, or so I fervently
hope, for music one day to snap into three dimensions
and give me my buildings back.
MORE
INFORMATION
This article first appeared
in the Kansas The Guardian UK on February 19, 2008. Their
website can be found at http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/.
Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation.
Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound. — Kabir
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