reality check –
Being back in NYC I had some hints that things hadn’t changed much. Walking down the street there was the now familiar feeling of full city soundscape on the right, and emptiness, an aural hole on the left. Don’t know why this same feeling wasn’t present in Beijing, but it’s a New York phenomenon I recognized immediately when I got back. But I also seem to be able to get some information in my left ear, even if quite distorted. See my entry from June 8 regarding stereo in my headphones. So I was hopeful yesterday going into my first hearing test in a month.
The scientific result is that there’s no real change in my hearing. My right ear is in great shape. My left ear is more or less useless. My responses to clear tone tests (beeps at various frequencies) shows a loss of about 70dB. And my ability to distinguish spoken words is about 20%. Last time that figure was 36%. The audiologist said the difference wasn’t really 16%, but rather that both figures just show that I can’t hear anything clearly in that ear. In response to my hopes of getting a hearing aid, he said that if my ability to distinguish speech was up to about 85%, he’d be able to help me. But with levels at 20% or 36% the only result would be that I’d hear the distorted and incomprehensible sounds louder. His notes on the visit said that the prognosis for any benefit from a hearing aid was not good.
My perception during the test was that I thought I could hear more of the words. I certainly could hear more than I did during my 2nd test in April, when my ability to distinguish words was down to 4%, which is equivalent to stone cold deaf. But obviously my perceptions don’t match the clinical results of the test. One explanation, which I mentioned to the audiologist, is that maybe I’m just learning to adapt to what I’ve got. He seemed to think that made sense. He didn’t seem to think there was any real improvement.
I see the ENT doctor again next week. I don’t know that I hold a lot of hope for things getting better, though I certainly want to explore every option I can find. Several people have recommended acupuncture or other alternative treatments, and I’ll make follow-up calls to see if any of that might hold any hope of results. The audiologist suggested that rather than seeing an otolaryngologist (Ear-Nose-Throat specialist), I should be seeing an otologist (ear specialist). However, I kind of suspect at this point that either there will be some improvement over time, or there won’t be. And that it won’t have a lot to do with either medical or alternative treatments. The audiologist spoke about my ear as severely damaged. He seemed to think that unless there was some way to assess the cause of that damage, it would be futile to pursue further treatment, since I’ve now gone through the most aggressive generic treatment for SSNHL.
Since I knew from my friend Conrad that the audiologist also does cochlear implants, I asked about that as well. He showed me the device, which is not what I expected. It’s about the size and shape of a large New York City waterbug (like a 3-4 inch long cockroach) with a magnetic disk at one end, and two tentacles at the other end. It’s implanted under the skin behind your ear, and the tentacles somehow connect to your aural nerves to transmit electrical impulses which are understood by your brain as sound. To get the sound from the air, there’s a big hearing aid-like transducer which hangs on your ear, with a dangling magnetic disk which attaches through your skin to the magnet on the implanted waterbug. He said they’ve never done a cochlear implant on someone with such perfect hearing in the unaffected ear, but that it might be experimentally interesting. He speculated that there might be some conflict between the electrical hearing delivered by the implant and the acoustical hearing delivered by my good ear. He also thought that before we pursued anything this drastic, it would be important to let my current situation evolve for at least a year or so to see if anything improved on its own. He said that once the implant was in place, any hope of hearing acoustically in that ear would be destroyed.
All in all, this doesn’t sound very appealing to me. I had somehow imagined that the implant would be something which would go into my inner ear to replace my organic cochlea … invisible from the outside, tiny, and a full restorative to my natural hearing. None of this seems the case, and the idea that there would be some kind of cognitive conflict between my acoustic and electronic hearing is particularly unappealing.
While I’d really like to find a way for this problem to go away, I have a feeling that it’s not going to. But I can still hear with one ear. And I can get some sense of spacialization in headphones (though with lots of distortion on the left). And my inner sense of what I hear is still clear. And the rest of my body seems to be OK. And my family is OK. And my friends are OK. So while I continue to hunt for some way to improve my hearing, I think I need to try to keep being grateful that I can still pursue my musical goals, and still enjoy my life, my family and my friends.
It would be great if every set-back could be fixed. But of course, that’s not reality. What I can do is learn to adapt as best I can to what I’ve got, and to spend as much of my time as I can doing what’s important to me.
last concert (in China, for now) …
On the plane back from Beijing. Last night was the final concert of the trip in Beijing’s 798 Art Area, and it was all the good and bad of working in China rolled up together. Good was eventually having a room full of maybe 200+ people cheering and applauding for music they definitely didn’t anticipate, and probably had never heard anything like. Bad was the day of complete chaos leading up to the concert, with the director and crew showing up 3 hours late, electricity being brought to the room at about 5:30, and an incredibly loud DJ party in the plaza outside the hall. Oh yes, and the fact that the hall itself was a concrete box on the top floor of what appeared to be a defunct worker’s dormitory for an old munitions factory.
The hearing adventure began when a student arrived (about an hour after our supposed set-up time of 11am) to take me to the room where I was to leave my equipment until the sound system arrived at 1pm. The room, maybe 30 ft wide by 120 ft long, was four flights up a crumbling staircase with shattered tiles on the steps and a view into the defunct communal bathrooms on each landing. The room had a reverberation time you’d normally associate with a gothic cathedral. Probably 1.5 seconds of rolling, jumbled reverberation after any sound. I called the director, who said he knew but he was sure it would get better when there was an audience. In any case, there was nothing to do about it. Don’t worry.
Left a student to baby-sit my gear while I went and got some lunch and looked around some galleries. Came back at 1:30, as we’d agreed on the telephone, since the sound system and director were going to arrive at 1pm. No one was there. Worse, there was a major outdoor sound system set up in the plaza four stories down, now pumping out DJ background music for whatever event was going on down there. Not a lot of people in evidence, but lots of boom boom boom boom. The eight musicians who were to play Economic Engine arrived about this time for our scheduled rehearsal from 2-6, and we sat around a bit in the 90º heat trying to figure out what to do with no sound system and with the DJ’s sound inundating the room. Open the windows and you can hear nothing but the DJ. Close the windows and you bake. Probably up to 95º by mid-afternoon. Calls again brought the response that the sound system would be there any minute, and the DJ in the plaza would stop by 5 pm, and an air conditioning system would be delivered. Don’t worry.
2:30 pm still no sign of director or sound system, and I was back on the phone, beginning to get pretty upset. The director’s boss called me back and said he wanted to talk to the director, then was surprised he wasn’t there. I began rehearsing the musicians acoustically, all of us trying to hear through the echo chamber-like room and the booming DJ outside.
Obviously, this is a terrible listening environment, even for someone with two good ears an no ubiquitous white noise generator following them around. But the immediate bottom line was that I was pretty much able to hear the instruments playing (or not) their parts, and was able to give them some direction about dealing with the various ensemble problems. But it was sort of like listening to a 78 rpm record which has been left our in a sand storm.
3pm or so and the sound system arrives, along with great numbers of workers hauling scaffolding for the video projector and at least three seven-foot tall air conditioners and compressors to go outside. This makes the task of rehearsing even harder, particularly since people keep shouting and clanking the equipment without any regard to the fact that musicians are working. And everything was in an echo chamber.
4pm we stop the rehearsal for a few minutes while I set up the microphones for the instruments. Then I’m told that they’re waiting for the electricity. Turns out that the electricity needs to be brought up from the plaza below (with the DJ) and they’re trying to find a 200 meter long extension cord to drop down the four story building and pull across the plaza. We rehearse acoustically for a little while longer, then I tell the musicians to take a break, and I’ll call them when we get electricity. I set up my gear as though the electricity were there, in hopes that it will be quicker to get it going once there’s juice.
5pm Bruce Gremo arrives and sets up his gear despite the lack of electricity. 5:30 we finally get electric power!! I call the players back, Bruce and I each make sure we’ve got sound, then I check the feeds from each of the players. There are three bad mic cables. First the sound man refuses to believe it could be his cables. Then he says there are no more cables. I have a temper tantrum and tell the sound man and the director that they need to find more cables. I say get five, so that if there are any more problems we’ll be covered. They send a student down to the DJ in the plaza and she comes back with two more cables. Another temper tantrum.
6:15 I ask the director when they’re going to stop the DJ downstairs. He says 5pm. I point out that it’s 6:15. He howls like a wolf and yells at someone to go down and talk to them.
By about 7pm I’ve done all the testing I can of the cables, and we’re short one – which means we’re short one mic, because the bad cable on the cello seems to cause a low frequency hum, which grows into a huge boom. I go ahead and try to rehearse with the electronic processing, keeping the cello way lower than she should have been because of the bad cable.
Here’s where the combination of hearing problem and listening environment really kicked in (not to mention the frustration of waiting in a loud hot room for 6 ½ hrs for the set-up which was supposed to happen at 11am). I could hear if delays happened, and I could sort of hear some of the more obvious distortion effects. But I really couldn’t tell much of anything about the quality of the sound or the balance of the mix of live and processed sound. Bruce went to the audience area and gave me feedback, and also mentioned that in the back of the hall the reverberation was so overwhelming that it was hard to distinguish anything.
7:45 we’ve done everything we can and stop for the 8pm concert, since the hall is already filling with people. I change my clothes in one of the empty dorm rooms, which is coated with at least ¼ in of dirt and dust on all surfaces. I head to the bathroom, which is in a building across the plaza, only to find the building locked. So I have a pre-performance pee behind some kind of 20 ft tall storage tank near the plaza and head in to the performance. I get back to the hall, and it’s packed with people, with more filing in. Cindy and the director are trying to make the video projection work, while the audience waits and watches. Just as I’m about to go on, the student who was looking for more cables runs up to me and says she’s found one more cable and do I want to test it now? Too late, I tell her. We start closer to 8:30 than to 8.
People seemed to love A Robert Johnson Sampler and Gate Beats. Wild cheering, and a young woman as MC (in Mandarin) egging them on to further shouts and cheers. I, on the other hand, could hardly hear anything. My stage monitor mix was present, but between the white noise and the din of the room, I couldn’t really hear any detail of what I was doing. So it seems a bit unfair for me to take credit for playing well, though I’m glad everyone liked it.
Next Bruce (playing the sillia – his homemade electronic flute-like controller) and Cindy (video) and I do a 20 minute improvisation. Again, it was greeted with wild enthusiasm by the audience. I really enjoyed playing, and particularly the sense of exchange and interplay with Bruce’s playing. But as in the rehearsals with the ensemble, I felt like I was mostly working on the level of events, not really being able to get in and hear the details of the sounds. Some of this the room, some of this my hearing.
Finally the musicians came out and we did Economic Engine. We lost half the audience on this one … I’m not sure if it was because they were put off by the more classical nature of the piece, or if it was that the concert was going about half an hour over the stated end time because we started late. In any case, the players suffered from the room sounds, and had difficulty hearing each other. Which was made worse by the fact that people leaving generated walking talking and chair-scraping noises, which filled up the reverberant sound space. Also, the pipa continued to play wrong notes, which has a pronounced harmonic effect on the piece, and two pages of the first violinist’s part were evidently blown away by the air conditioning, which was turned on right before the concert started. And of course, I was mixing according to the presence of processing events, not really able to discern the quality of the sounds in the mix.
The remaining audience was still enthusiastic about the piece, and quite a few people waylaid me afterwards with thanks and congratulations. I’m glad we got to play the piece this second time, and I feel like I have a very good sense of what needs to happen musically to improve it for the New York performance. But I also think I need to have Jody (or someone else, if he’s not available) help me out on the mix in NYC to make sure it really works there. I actually think it’s a really cool piece, but it’s going to take some additional effort to make it work as it ought to.
This whole experience serves to remind me that much of what I hear as a musician takes place in my head, and that as long as I can hear clearly in my head, I can probably deal with the manifestations which come through my damaged hearing equipment.
Which brings us back to the plane. For the first hour and a half of the flight I had an very good conversation with the man sitting next to me, a North Carolina lawyer who was doing educational and missionary work in rural southern China for two weeks with US high school students. Unfortunately, he’s sitting on my left. Rather than get into the details of my hearing problem, I’ve just been turning my head to the left so that I can hear him with my good right ear. So, airplane noise, white noise, and then the conversation on the wrong side of my body. I think I was able to pick up about 80% of the conversation. Not bad. But it’s another reason I hope things will improve enough to enable me to get to a hearing aid …
rained out …
I’m packed up and ready to head off for my final concert in China this evening. Was supposed to play a preview last night, and had a relatively normal situation for here. When I first arrived the producer asked if I could do a 10 minute preview slot in the big outdoor party show which would open the festival on the 20th … the night before my concert. So I arrived at 2pm as requested for sound check, and for time to work with the video artist. Video artist didn’t arrive til after 3pm, and they didn’t get to our sound check until about 5:30. It was a hot, muggy, smoggy day, but everyone was in good humor and waiting around 798 Art Area for 3 and a half hours wasn’t a terrible way to spend my next to last day in China. Sound check went OK when we got it … the very professional sound man even was able to adjust my stage monitor to deal with my non-hearing left ear.
Cindy, the video artist, and I were to receive an award right before we performed out 10 minutes – I was to play Gate Beats, and Cindy was to do her “ink video” performance, which actually involves liquids like coke and beer and milk and soy sauce, as well as ink. The half hour before we were to go on there were some rumbles of thunder, and a couple of random rain drops, and all the gear for the show was covered with plastic, just in case. I was told to prepare my table of gear to be carried on to the stage. Just as I was uncovering it and starting up my computer, the heavens opened up. Huge downpour, which kept up for about an hour, on and off. By the time everyone was convinced that the rain was over more than half the audience was gone, and our section of the program was long gone because there was concern about the sound and projection gear. So I got the nice award, thanked everyone, and asked the audience to join me the following evening (tonight) for my concert. The evening continued … mostly seeming to be very funny spoken performances in Chinese, which I of course couldn’t understand. I was, at this point, mostly very concerned about my gear, and ended up packing up and heading home.
Hopefully this evening’s concert will actually happen. At least it’s scheduled to be indoors.
To just add a note about listening and hearing: the amplification for the sound check was very clean, but even with adjustments from the sound guy, it was very difficult for me to really feel like I was inside the sound. Partly, I think the problem was that our sound check was preceded by sound check for a very very loud rock band. While it wasn’t necessarily louder than Torturing Nurse, given the outdoor venue as opposed to the small club in Shanghai, it was much more difficult for me to tolerate. The guitar in particular just seemed like it blotted out everything, even my persistent white noise. Though I’m not sure it’s a good trade off.
noisey NoiShanghai …
When I’m in relative quiet (like right now, back in my little Beijing apartment), I’m very aware of the white noise in my left ear. When I’m with a crowd of people, like last night in Shanghai with a crowd of young, mostly Chinese musicians and friends in a small restaurant near the Live Bar venue for the NoiShanghai show, I’m aware of fighting with the ambiance and my diminished hearing on my left side, turning my head constantly so that my good right ear is pointing at whomever I want to hear. Less aware in that situation of the constant white noise (which is still there) than of having to listen through that and through the undifferentiated noise of the restaurant and group conversation.
However, at the NoiShanghai concert, I wasn’t aware of my own white noise at all. For the most part, I was awash in a sea of often very loud, sometimes very interesting, and generally very passionate music making. But not everything was terribly loud. There was a young student from London, in Shanghai studying Chinese language & culture, who did a very quiet performance by spreading out various sound-making objects on the floor, and rolling around with them, making very small, very soft sounds. Various tibetan bowl gongs, jingle bells, small cassette players with internal speakers, and a mandolin which he bowed. WANG Changcun, who was my original contact in the group, did a beautiful piece that was sort of repetitive and looping, but quite elegant. Then there was the Chinese composer who basically attacked a small guzheng (like a zither or a koto) which had contact mics on it. Attack is definitely the right word. Though part way through he put it up to his mouth, and I wasn’t sure if he was humming through it, or if he was administering oral sex, and the instrument itself was moaning appreciatively. In any case, it was all incredibly and relentlessly loud and noisy. Luckily, at the beginning of the concert Changcun had come over with a napkin to tear up and stuff in my ears. So I was able to listen without feeling I was damaging my remaining hearing.
Then there was the featured act (besides me), the Shanghai band Torturing Nurse. Basically, 2 guys (one of whom is XU Cheng, one of the founders of NoShanghai) making very very very very loud electronic sounds, mostly seeming to come from feedback and cheap guitar pedals. And they keep it up for 20 minutes. Then, I guess, there’s the nurse. A young woman who screams for 20 minutes non-stop into a microphone. This is not singing really hard, so it sounds like screaming. And it’s not singing with a screechy timbre. This is screaming. I think she took a couple of breaths in the 20 minutes, but I’m not entirely sure. Mostly, just non-stop screaming. And the dynamic level is probably about as loud as I’ve ever heard amplification.
In this case, I didn’t depend upon the napkins stuffed in my ears to protect my remaining hearing. I spent the whole set with fingers jammed firmly in ears. Both ears. And it was still about the loudest thing I’ve heard. However, it was also a really compelling performance. The energy and sense of total commitment from each of the three performers was palpable, and XU Cheng’s audio output from a table top full of stomp boxes was really imaginative. It was very high-energy and propulsive, but also beat-less. An interesting combination.
I ended the show with A Robert Johnson Sampler. Also fairly loud, but nothing like Torturing Nurse. Was going to play Gate Beats as well, but it had been a very long concert, and everyone seemed to like the Robert Johnson piece, so I just ended it there.
Was interesting setting up for my performance, though. I sit sideways on stage, with the audience to my right. They initially had a little monitor speaker for me set up behind me … which meant on my left. So, of course, I couldn’t hear the monitor speaker for shit. Another time when honesty is the best policy: I told the engineer that I couldn’t hear from my left ear, and they obligingly moved the monitor to my right side.
All in all, doing things in the academic music conservatories here and then outside the academic realm has been fascinating. There were maybe 25 people in the NoiShanghai audience, and the club was a dark, slightly smelly venue called Live Bar next to a bunch of auto repair shops in north east Shanghai. But I had the sense that all the people were there because they loved the scene and were really engaged with the music (and noise). There’s no money, but they were very gracious and took me and the other artists out for dinner afterwards, and certainly made me feel appreciated. At the conservatory, there was no social engagement at all, and the students seemed to be doing what they were supposed to do, rather than what they loved to do. Which might work if you were studying to be a dentist, but I don’t think works so well if you want to be a musician. My contact at the Shanghai Conservatory, Qin Yi, was quite intrigued by my discussion of this split that I’ve experienced, and talked about the potential of getting her students engaged in a non-academic scene. But I don’t think she’s in a position for do this in the face of a government run educational bureaucracy, which probably wouldn’t see the value of playing to 25 people in a smelly bar. I, fortunately, am not constrained in this way. I find immense hope and inspiration in being allowed to get to know this scene, in which I don’t believe any of the musicians are more than half my age.
what can you trust ? …
My sister emailed me regarding my June 8 entry, about hearing stereo again, to suggest that maybe it was an issue of my brain readjusting to my limited, but not entirely absent, left ear. Could be. On the other hand, I’d like to believe that there’s some improvement happening.
This afternoon I rehearsed my material for tomorrow’s show. Made a conscious decision to remove the mono-adapters from my headphones. I could indeed hear distinct stereo movement. The left saidwas always softer and tinnier, but it was there.
With cell phones and wireless phones, I hardly ever hear a dial tone any more. But when I pick up the phone in the hotel room here in Shanghai, there’s an old fashioned dial tone. The dial tone here seems to have components a major 3rd apart, but fairly rich overtone structure. At least that’s what I hear in my right ear. If I move the phone to the left ear I do hear a dial tone … but it’s now limited to just the fundamental tone as a sort of square wave, with all the highs cut off, and at a much lower dynamic level.
Yesterday I gave a lecture on my music at the Shanghai Conservatory, then a workshop where I listened to and critiqued student work. I particularly enjoyed the later. But it was a challenge to feel confident that I was hearing enough to comment on. Like, are there parts that I’m just not hearing, like I don’t hear all of the dial tone? Like much of what I do, I’m finding that the main things I have to listen to are what’s in my head, rather than what’s coming into my ears. What I ended up doing for the most part was giving critiques on form and strategies for enabling the audience to really hear how a piece is put together. However much I was hearing, it was enough to talk about these things. If I’d been asked to talk about the use of 5.1 surround sound, I’d have been really stuck.
I have a portable printer I’ve been carrying around with me on trips for about 5 years. When I got to Beijing, it started giving me various error messages, and then when I got to Shanghai it stopped feeding paper, giving constant “paper feed” errors. Called (via Skype) to the Canon printer repair place in NYC. They said that if the paper feed isn’t working the repair is more expensive than buying a new printer. So I removed the Bluetooth adapter from the printer (which I will hopefully be able to use with another printer) and decided to just leave it here when I go back to Beijing. No point in lugging the extra weight around while I’m traveling. But it’s very difficult to just say: this isn’t working any more, and I’m going to chuck it now.
Same way, I imagine I’m going to come to a point with my hearing where I’ll just have to accept where it is, and stop hopping it will get better. I still have a big question: is thereany way to use a hearing aid to get some of my hearing back? If I can get a positive answer, things will change. But what if, like the printer, it’s not going to be fix-able? At what point to I say: “this hope isn’t worth carrying around anymore”? I don’t want to be hopeless, and I’m not yet. But as is the case with the printer, there will certainly come a point at which I have to say that whatever improvement I’m going to see, I’ve seen. And at that time I stop hoping, and just adjust to what I’ve got. Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see what happens when I have a hearing test when I get back. Will my perceived improvement be deemed real? Or will there be no change shown since last time. This ought to be a question I can answer a priori. So why can’t I?
looking & listening …
I’ve spent and interesting few days. I’ve been fixing the various problems with Economic Engine’s digital processing, which has meant re-listening to what I did in performance, and re-thinking how I make use of the processing. I also just spent today rehearsing with Bruce Gremo and Cindy NG Sio Ieng, my video collaborator, for the concerts on June 20 & 21.
The news in terms of hearing is that there really is no news. No matter what I heard the other day in terms of stereo, something from my left ear, I’m basically hearing the sounds in the air as mono. That said, I’m hearing. So I think that my improvisations with Bruce today were sometimes quite beautiful, I was able to hear what we were doing (except for the stereo), and the real point is in how we hear each other and how we interact and react. And that didn’t feel like it was impacted by the hearing problem at all. Maybe I tend to pull back dynamically a little earlier than I might otherwise, because I think I can hear distinct sounds a little less clearly when they get dense than before. And when the chaos is impenetrable, I tend to pull back and try to refocus and see how I fit in.
Likewise, reworking the processing in Economic Engine felt like it was a matter of figuring out my direction and my concept, rather than struggling to hear what I can’t hear. Once I knew in my mind what I wanted the processing to sound like, and how it could develop, there was no problem hearing what I needed to hear to make it work.
Maybe less on focus regarding hearing, I had an interesting day on Monday going to visit an artist village outside Beijing with a woman who has been helping Cindy with video for the Economic Engine, and who living in the village. The village is called Song Zhuang, and my host was Xiao Shan. She took me to meet several of her friends and artists living in the village, including WANG Chuyu, a performance artist who is in one of the video segments of Economic Engine.
Evidently Song Zhuang has something like 3000 artists and maybe another 3000 farmers living there. Visiting the various young artists in their homes/studios was fascinating. Everyone was very warm and welcoming. The housing was a little rustic (toilets and kitchens generally in a courtyard, in separate buildings from the main living quarters), but generally quite nice, with each house focused on its individual courtyard. Several of the artists, including Chuyu and Pei Feng, the video editor we worked with on Economic Engine, had bought old farm houses. Pei Feng was just in the process of moving in, but the house and gardens have incredible character and spirit. Chuyu’s house, which he’s lived in for 10 years is very comfortable and feels settled in to. With a nice garden in the courtyard, some fruit trees, and a huge garden next door, outside the wall of the courtyard, full of vegetables.
I had a wonderful lunch cooked by Xiao Shan’s husband, and delicious zungzi (stuffed sweet rice cakes) made by Chuyu’s girlfriend’s mother. The a great spicy meal outside at a restaurant on the town’s one main street with Xiao Shan, her husband and WU Wencheng, another of the artists we’d visited during the day.
It’s not at all clear to me how everyone in Song Zhuang lives. People seem to just make art, and certainly aren’t supported by the government (though the town’s farmers are, evidently). The housing is rustic but comfortable, and the community feeling seems quite rich and supportive of their work. Lots of galleries, museums, etc.
Walking around with Xiao Shan, I just asked her to always walk on my right so I could hear her better. When she forgot, I reminded her and re-adjusted our positions. One of the things I was aware of was that this isn’t so unexpected in someone my age. Most of the artists I met were in their late 20s or early 30s I think, and they saw me as in interesting old foreign artist/musician. Sometimes old people don’t hear so well. Big deal.
I’ll be curious to get back to NYC and have another hearing test. Walking around Song Zhuang, and rehearsing today, I was certainly aware of not hearing with my left ear … though there is a sense that something is coming in, though it’s mostly quite distorted. Yet the other day I did hear stereo in the headphones while listening to Balkanization. So I don’t really know what to believe … whether my hearing is improving an little, or whether it’s just wishful thinking.
My sister Kyle wrote after my entry about hearing stereo, that maybe I really am hearing something in my left ear, and this is just my body adjusting and learning how to hear what’s there. I guess it’s also possible that my stereo episode was just a projection of wishful thinking. I guess that’s why it would be nice to have another test and try to get a more quantitative evaluation. It’s interesting that I haven’t listened with un-adapted headphones again. I think I’m a little afraid that i won’t hear it again. That probably tells me something too.
what’s that I hear now …
I’ve been noticing for a while how people speaking to me from my left side appear to my brain as a kind of rattling sound. As I’ve been working on music, I’ve been very careful to use the headphone adapters which Jody made for me, which distribute the sound to both ears … to make sure I’m not missing half the sound. Works OK, and I don’t seem to notice the rattling so much in this situation.
On Thursday I head to Shanghai, and I’ve been working on the music I’ll be playing there. Probably 3 pieces: Gate Beats, Robert Johnson Sampler, and Balkanization. It’s been a while since I played them, so I’ve set up my gear in my apartment and have been working on them, getting them back together. When I got the material for Balkanization up, I couldn’t quite remember what I was supposed to do with it. So after poking around for a while, I listened to the recording on the CD from 1991 (I think). I listened from iTunes, and rather than use my headphone adapter (which was in my audio interface already, attached to my good headphones), I just grabbed a cheap pair of little head phones and plugged them into the computer.
As the piece opens up, and particularly in the middle, when the first synthesized sounds come in, I heard the stereo. No shit. Clearly moving back and forth. The sound in the left ear was very distorted, but it was there. I was momentarily transported. And completely confused. Had to do a double take before I realized that I was listening through headphones with no adapter, and so the sound was being delivered in stereo. And I was hearing it.
I’ve been walking around the last few days either not thinking about my hearing, or being very aware that the white noise is my constant companion. But then to actually hear a recording with the sound panning from one side to the other!! Forget about the rest of that stuff. Let’s hope that this is something that will lead to at least having the ability to have a hearing aid which will let me hear stereo. But even distorted, it was a momentary bit of heaven.
ear updates …
What do I hear? For the last week I’ve been noticing a lot of kazoo-like rattling as I walk down the streets of Beijing or sit in restaurants and talk to people. On my left side, people rattle. If I can maneuver them to my right side, they’re clear. Sometimes I just tell people to get on my right, but often they forget and they end up on my left, and I just put up with the rattle, and the fact that I then lose some part of the conversation.
On the positive, maybe hopeful side: when I listen to words or music on headphones, I find that if I just wear the left headphone I can hear something. It’s rattling and kazoo-like, but I can understand words. And this is generally with a moderate volume (moderate for my right ear, pretty soft in my left ear). So maybe that’s an improvement. I keep hoping that enough hearing will return for me to get a hearing aide and have stereo again.
Which leads to the lack of location. Dinner at a friend’s house. Their daughter calls to me as I walk in, and I look around. I have no idea where her voice is coming from. Similarly, walking through the compound of my apartment building, beautiful gardens with families and people of all ages out enjoying the warm June evening amidst the grass, trees, and water occupying the space between the 8 30-story buildings which make up this complex. I hear someone speaking English, and look around at various couples and groups nearby. I don’t have a clue which group is speaking English. Then I hear a ball bouncing … again, I can’t track where the ball comes from aurally. Finally I notice some kids on the other side of a bush, bouncing the ball back and forth.
I guess if I were a prehistoric human on some African plain, I’d become a lion’s dinner pretty quickly. We hear with both ears so that when danger comes from one direction, we run in the other. Me, I’d just look around and try to figure with my eyes where that lion sound came from … and while I looked around, I’d most likely become dinner. Luckily, I don’t foresee being in that kind of situation in the near future.
What I do foresee is asking people I work with to help me hear. Listening to the recordings of Economic Engine, I keep noticing that the yangqin is very soft. It wasn’t when we performed it … but I was sitting very close to it. Obviously, I heard the acoustic sound through the air, and couldn’t distinguish the acoustic sound from the amplified sound. But the amplified sound is what was recorded, and it was way too soft. So unless my hearing improves significantly, I need to make sure that I deputize someone I’m working with to make sure that levels and stereo placement sound good. I know what it needs to sound like, but I just can’t hear if it’s there or not. How very strange. How do I communicate what I want to hear, if I can’t check it and say to someone: “this is right, that’s wrong”? Interesting challenge. We’ll see.
anger reconsidered, and listening …
It’s interesting to have my mother reading my blog (Hi Mom!). She wrote to me following up on my comments about my rage leading up to the performance of Economic Engine. She suggested that rather than blame it on the steroids, maybe I should think about the fact that I haven’t shown any anger about losing my hearing in my left ear. And, she suggested, the anger must be there, and it’s got to come out somehow. Seems pretty insightful to me. Thanks, Mom.
The white noise is with me all the time, though I tend not to notice it so much when I’m working alone. But when I’m in the street, or in a noisy restaurant, or just taking a moment to listen … it’s there, and it’s louder than anything else around. There have been a few places in the last few days:
Last night I went for dinner with Ben Granier, a French composer living in Beijing, and his girl friend. Walking down the street before dinner they were on my left side, and I just had a terrible time trying to hear him. His voice was tinny and distant, and I didn’t feel comfortable asking him to move to the right side as we walked. Then, in a small cheap Chinese restaurant (delicious and cheap!!) I had to fight through the din to hear Ben and Eva speak, but sitting across the table I was mostly able to aim my good ear at them. Walking back to the subway after dinner, I made sure they were on my right, and I could hear them much more clearly.
Today, after working in my apartment all day until about 3:30, I took a long long walk. Went from West Tian’anmen subway stop, north into Jingshan Park, then over to Beihai Park, and up through the Back Lakes to the Jishuitan subway stop. Jingshan Park is a big hill overlooking the the Forbidden City, and supposedly made of the earth which was removed to make the moat surrounding the Forbidden City. As I climbed up and down the huge hill, with multiple temples and altars along the summit, I heard the sound of a band, and I think a chorus. They were playing various cheesy Chinese pieces, as well as some Christmas carols, including Jingle Bells. I looked for them, and never found them. In fact, I’m not sure if they were live or recorded. But I can’t tell where any sound comes from, so try as I might, I just couldn’t track them down.
Up near the Jishuitan subway stop, after finding only KFC and Pizza Hut at the obvious Department Store which dominates the neighborhood, I found another cheap and bustling neighborhood restaurant for dinner, where I ordered kind of randomly from a menu I couldn’t read, and got great food nonetheless. However, the noise was incredible. I was sitting there with my food, reading a book (which the waitress seemed to think was quite bazaar and quit funny) and just felt like I was miles away from the noise around me. Because the entire din was in Mandarin, it just became a blur. Even though I can usually pick out random words and phrases around me, this time it was just overwhelming, and reading a book in English seemed to help me just drift away from my surroundings.
Then walking back from the Guo Mao subway to my apartment, about 15 minutes through heavy traffic and lots of people, I experienced a sensation I’ve been feeling a lot. Like the left side of my world is empty. It’s almost as though the white noise were a huge absorbent cotton ball, just soaking up the audible world on that side of me. It’s almost a tangible, physical sense of “missing-ness.”
Finally, I began to listen to the recordings of the performance. I didn’t get very far this evening because I’m so tired from my long walk. But one think I did notice is that there were some places early on where the effects were clearly on, but I thought (and intended) that they were off. If this really turns out to be true, then that means I’ve really got to be thinking about having a sound person (one with 2 ears) somehow managing my sound as it goes out into the world (or the concert hall). This is where it gets scary for me. Or maybe this is where I need to get angry.
