Experiencing Tinnitus: The Intricacies of our Musical Instruments
Whee! I have tinnitus. It emerged in 2017, decades after attending the loudest concerts of my life – like the Birthday Party in Melbourne’s Seaview Ballroom in 1983, where my ears rang for days, or the Young Gods in the Sarah Sands hotel in 1992, which rattled windows and damn near lifted the roof.
But my tinnitus appeared in the quiet of my own home, at a time when I couldn’t bear to play even a CD at the lowest volume. Those close to me who know how central music is to my life, noticed the dust collecting on my audio gear. Yet, I was alone in my flat. Just me and the ever-present ringing in my ears. The cause? Perhaps it was the stress of the nervous breakdown I was experiencing. Or maybe it resulted from my attempts to scratch the maddeningly itchy wax from my ears. Whatever the reason, one month I was a person whose head found silence in silence, and the next month, I was a person with a sound inside that others couldn’t hear.
That sound lingers even now, six years later. Sit by my side, and with your ear against my head, you may hear the soft inhalation of air into my lungs, if you’re not distracted by the same sound happening in your own body. However, you won’t hear the metallic squeal, akin to the brakes of a train perpetually slowing down but never coming to a halt. That sound is mine alone.
Our eardrums are no different from the drums played by a drummer – we are the instruments being played by the world. I can make the ringing in my ears louder by pushing my jaw forward, which reminds me that my ears are made up of bone, flesh, hair, and membrane that are subtly impacted when I change the shape of my face. Hearing is not merely a magical receptor that connects to the brain. Rather, the sounds we hear exist in the silence of the world until the atmosphere is disturbed and enters our ears. Our brains and ears function as musical instruments. In essence, our eardrums are conceptually similar to the drums struck by drummers. The world plays us.
This realization has significant implications for how we perceive music. Push your jaw out. Does it create a ringing in your brain? If not, your head is a different musical instrument from mine. Across the human population, there are various head shapes, ear designs, and infinite variations of brains enclosed within bony globes of cerebrospinal fluid. Most likely, each person experiences slightly different sounds when the world plays them. Unfortunately, we can’t help assuming that others hear the same way we do. Some argue that there is a basic design to which we all conform, considering we are a specific type of hominid primate. However, there are limits to standardization. Each of us is unique and organic – no artificial substances or prefab components whatsoever. Imagine 8 billion handmade guitars manufactured in 195 different countries, each using local materials. How many of them would function the same way? Face it: you are a different guitar from those around you. Maybe even a very different guitar.
In the past, my hearing was pretty good. By this, I don’t mean that I experienced music more profoundly than Brian Wilson, who only had one functioning ear, or Evelyn Glennie, the esteemed percussionist who has been profoundly deaf throughout her career. I simply mean that, from the start, everything was in order. As we age, it’s typical to lose some of our ability to detect higher-pitched treble sounds. Since my fifties, I’ve been turning the treble knob on my music system’s amplifier to the max.
Is tinnitus unbearable? Perhaps for some. Individuals affected by it use strong language when describing their experiences – “desperation,” “distress,” “disabling,” “debilitating,” and even “suicide ideation.” However, the connection between tinnitus and suicide is weak. The story of a man who jumped off a tall building after being told by doctors that nothing could stop the ringing in his head seems to be an urban myth. For the most part, those affected learn to live with the challenges that come with aging ears (and eyes, joints, and teeth). They have to.
Nevertheless, there are days when my desire to silence my tinnitus becomes unbearably acute. It becomes a matter of consent, or rather, the lack thereof. When I play certain pieces of music for pleasure, like Pan Sonic or Einstürzende Neubauten, their sounds resemble my tinnitus. However, I choose to play those sounds at that moment. My tinnitus never asks if I’m okay with a high-pitched whine. It follows me everywhere, into the bathroom and even into bed.
Interestingly, noise provides relief from this ailment. One popular treatment option is a “tinnitus masker” – an audio input that patients describe as the sound of wind through trees or a waterfall. Personally, I don’t fancy hearing waterfall noises unless I’m actually standing next to one. My remedy for tinnitus is to play music.
Some of the music I play, like Pan Sonic, occupies similar frequencies to my tinnitus. Other genres, such as acoustic folk or solo piano, are far from it. However, the specific noise the music makes matters less than the quality of my concentration. Perhaps I’m forging new auditory pathways, or maybe I’m simply not sophisticated enough to notice a high-pitched whine when I’m deeply focused on five other sounds.
Once, I met a man with damaged eyes who saw large dark cylinders floating within his field of vision. With time, these obstructions faded away. Though the damage to his eyes remained, the cylinders must have still been present. Yet, he trained himself not to see them.
This is what I’m attempting to do with my tinnitus. Some days are better than others.
My experience with tinnitus has taught me to be aware of my organic nature rather than conceiving of myself as a self-contained consciousness installed in an android console. I am not a ghost in a machine. I am made of flesh, gristle, and osseous tissue. I belong to the same category as the once-living contents of my spaghetti marinara. The first time I cooked a pheasant, I marveled at its odd little bones, far more numerous than those found inside a chicken. What purpose did they serve?
The human body is filled with peculiar little parts. While some have basic functions like reproduction or digestion, others exist to navigate the complexities of music, such as discerning nuances in a recording or unraveling the enigmatic sounds of a song. It’s astonishing that we process something as delicate as music using the most rudimentary tools – fragments of bone, slimy substances, and tiny bundles of hair.
It’s like equipping a spaceship with an…
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