MY MAGICAL MUSICAL MEMORIES
Don’t let anyone tell you that when your hearing goes, it goes quietly. The reverse is true. Or at least it was in my case. When I lost my hearing, quite suddenly and unexpectedly one summer morning five years ago, it was as if I had been dropped, body and soul, into a breaker’s yard on the busiest Tuesday of the metal-crushing season. It was bedlam. And I’d only lost one ear.
‘PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!’
That was the first noise – a loud hydraulic hiss, like compressed air escaping from a valve. It filled the dead-ear side of my head like gas. But this was only the beginning. Sudden neurosensory hearing loss brings with it a whole orchestra Within hours, the rest of my head became a Royal Albert Hall of howls, distortions, whistles, smashing sounds, zizzes, even strange voices, all of them apparently occasioned by the serenade of inconsequential exterior sounds you might encounter going about your daily business: the scrape of chair legs, the scrunch of paper bags, the husk of your best friend’s laugh… Ordinary sounds. Now agony. I had lost the auditory function of one ear completely and, as a result, my brain was now reducing what hearing I had left to an indescribably unpleasant hullabaloo.
Tinnitus. Hyperacusis. These are the two words we use to describe, in clinical terms, what was going on inside my head. But those who know what tinnitus and hyperacusis actually entail will testify to the cold inadequacy of those words. We define ourselves partly through the means by which we ‘receive’ the world, and I no longer received the world at all, except as neural pain. For a period, just being alive was close to unbearable.
As for music… What music? Music was now inaccessible, except as a distorted, flat, emotion-free cipher of itself. An ugly scribble. I could tell that music was music, but I couldn’t tell you whether it was beautiful or not. It was just one more unpleasant thing.
All of which was something of a blow because music is not only the greatest passion of my life, it was also how I made my living. I had written about music in some depth for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years, and to face up to the rest of my life without it, and without the opportunity to write about it, seemed impossible. At the time I was 47 years old. I went into a very dark corner.
I got out of the corner in the end for two reasons, and neither of them is medical. I am still deaf in one ear. There has been no cure for my hearing loss, or the tinnitus, but I am not in the corner any more, and that seems pretty good to me. One release was an act of desperation, rather than a calculated strategy. At the time, I felt I had no choice.
A by-product of losing all hearing in one ear is that you also lose a lot of your balance function. The world becomes a tippy, sicky blur. And so I was immobilised for some months, laid out like a picnic in my own bed, able to get out from under the duvet only to respond to the most basic biological imperatives, often having to crawl to get there. Balance-enhancing physiotherapy would take more than six months to become available (don’t ask) and so I was confined either to a supine or a heavily buttressed sitting position, day after day, night after night, week after week. I decided to get writing because… well, because I couldn’t do anything else, and 10-minute bursts of squiffy-eyed typing were better than no activity at all.
It seemed to me that if I was now, to all intents and purposes, utterly useless as a human being, I should at least try to do something creative with what small facility I had left. So I began to write about what had happened to me, and what it meant to lose music. These questions, after all, were what filled most of my waking thoughts, possibly as displacement brain activity. Not ‘where has music gone?’ but ‘why did I love music so much in the first place?’
How come it was so important to me? What did this fascination consist of? And if losing it is so catastrophic, what does that say about how we build value into our experience of music?
I was also beginning to put into practice an exercise recommended to me by a distinguished neuroscientist. He had explained how, if I wanted to hear music again, I would have to teach my brain how to listen in new ways.
It was put to me that if I still had one functioning ear, then even if the auditory message from it was scrambled on arrival at the central decoding area, then the plasticity of the brain is such that it would allow for the cutting of new pathways, the making of new solutions to the tricky art of listening (listening is, after all, hearing with added mind). And the best way to do this was to start remembering my favourite music, in as much detail as possible, systematically.
To support this notion, I was introduced to the curious neuroscientifc fact that the electroencephalographic image of activity generated by a music-listening brain is almost identical to the image generated by a music-remembering one. And so I did. Every night I lay in bed and remembered in minute, sequential detail my favourite music. John Coltrane, Marvin Gaye, JS Bach, the Rolling Stones, Harold Darke, Amy Winehouse…
It was difficult to do at first – try remembering your favourite piece of music, note for note, starting at the beginning and proceeding in the right order in real time to the end; not easy – but the exercise, endlessly repeated night after night, bore remarkable fruit, firstly in terms of what it did for my ruined auditory function, but also in what it did for my relationship with music – and my understanding of why my connection with it is so deep and extensive. The book, The Train In The Night: A Story Of Music And Loss, is the result.
But there was more to my escape from the dark corner than the autotherapy of writing a book. I don’t think I would have made it out at all without love. I mean this literally. I mean it in a soppy, sentimental way, of course, but also in a serious way, too. As I suggested earlier, people who su er a permanent cognitive impairment no longer ‘get’ the world in the same way. You, me, them, the other lot – we all derive a sense of who we are from the way things seem to us. It’s how we parse our individuality. But when you lose out suddenly and significantly on the cognition front, all that subtle self-defining discernment goes out the window. Your sense of who you are just… disintegrates.
And, to cut a much longer story very short indeed, love is the stuff that glues you back together. Love and good music.
Nick Coleman’s The Train In The Night: A Story Of Music And Loss was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2012. It is available now in Vintage paperback, priced £8.99.
‘PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!’
That was the first noise – a loud hydraulic hiss, like compressed air escaping from a valve. It filled the dead-ear side of my head like gas. But this was only the beginning. Sudden neurosensory hearing loss brings with it a whole orchestra Within hours, the rest of my head became a Royal Albert Hall of howls, distortions, whistles, smashing sounds, zizzes, even strange voices, all of them apparently occasioned by the serenade of inconsequential exterior sounds you might encounter going about your daily business: the scrape of chair legs, the scrunch of paper bags, the husk of your best friend’s laugh… Ordinary sounds. Now agony. I had lost the auditory function of one ear completely and, as a result, my brain was now reducing what hearing I had left to an indescribably unpleasant hullabaloo.
Tinnitus. Hyperacusis. These are the two words we use to describe, in clinical terms, what was going on inside my head. But those who know what tinnitus and hyperacusis actually entail will testify to the cold inadequacy of those words. We define ourselves partly through the means by which we ‘receive’ the world, and I no longer received the world at all, except as neural pain. For a period, just being alive was close to unbearable.
As for music… What music? Music was now inaccessible, except as a distorted, flat, emotion-free cipher of itself. An ugly scribble. I could tell that music was music, but I couldn’t tell you whether it was beautiful or not. It was just one more unpleasant thing.
All of which was something of a blow because music is not only the greatest passion of my life, it was also how I made my living. I had written about music in some depth for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years, and to face up to the rest of my life without it, and without the opportunity to write about it, seemed impossible. At the time I was 47 years old. I went into a very dark corner.
I got out of the corner in the end for two reasons, and neither of them is medical. I am still deaf in one ear. There has been no cure for my hearing loss, or the tinnitus, but I am not in the corner any more, and that seems pretty good to me. One release was an act of desperation, rather than a calculated strategy. At the time, I felt I had no choice.
A by-product of losing all hearing in one ear is that you also lose a lot of your balance function. The world becomes a tippy, sicky blur. And so I was immobilised for some months, laid out like a picnic in my own bed, able to get out from under the duvet only to respond to the most basic biological imperatives, often having to crawl to get there. Balance-enhancing physiotherapy would take more than six months to become available (don’t ask) and so I was confined either to a supine or a heavily buttressed sitting position, day after day, night after night, week after week. I decided to get writing because… well, because I couldn’t do anything else, and 10-minute bursts of squiffy-eyed typing were better than no activity at all.
It seemed to me that if I was now, to all intents and purposes, utterly useless as a human being, I should at least try to do something creative with what small facility I had left. So I began to write about what had happened to me, and what it meant to lose music. These questions, after all, were what filled most of my waking thoughts, possibly as displacement brain activity. Not ‘where has music gone?’ but ‘why did I love music so much in the first place?’
How come it was so important to me? What did this fascination consist of? And if losing it is so catastrophic, what does that say about how we build value into our experience of music?
I was also beginning to put into practice an exercise recommended to me by a distinguished neuroscientist. He had explained how, if I wanted to hear music again, I would have to teach my brain how to listen in new ways.
It was put to me that if I still had one functioning ear, then even if the auditory message from it was scrambled on arrival at the central decoding area, then the plasticity of the brain is such that it would allow for the cutting of new pathways, the making of new solutions to the tricky art of listening (listening is, after all, hearing with added mind). And the best way to do this was to start remembering my favourite music, in as much detail as possible, systematically.
To support this notion, I was introduced to the curious neuroscientifc fact that the electroencephalographic image of activity generated by a music-listening brain is almost identical to the image generated by a music-remembering one. And so I did. Every night I lay in bed and remembered in minute, sequential detail my favourite music. John Coltrane, Marvin Gaye, JS Bach, the Rolling Stones, Harold Darke, Amy Winehouse…
It was difficult to do at first – try remembering your favourite piece of music, note for note, starting at the beginning and proceeding in the right order in real time to the end; not easy – but the exercise, endlessly repeated night after night, bore remarkable fruit, firstly in terms of what it did for my ruined auditory function, but also in what it did for my relationship with music – and my understanding of why my connection with it is so deep and extensive. The book, The Train In The Night: A Story Of Music And Loss, is the result.
But there was more to my escape from the dark corner than the autotherapy of writing a book. I don’t think I would have made it out at all without love. I mean this literally. I mean it in a soppy, sentimental way, of course, but also in a serious way, too. As I suggested earlier, people who su er a permanent cognitive impairment no longer ‘get’ the world in the same way. You, me, them, the other lot – we all derive a sense of who we are from the way things seem to us. It’s how we parse our individuality. But when you lose out suddenly and significantly on the cognition front, all that subtle self-defining discernment goes out the window. Your sense of who you are just… disintegrates.
And, to cut a much longer story very short indeed, love is the stuff that glues you back together. Love and good music.
Nick Coleman’s The Train In The Night: A Story Of Music And Loss was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2012. It is available now in Vintage paperback, priced £8.99.