An Unheard-of Issue

Anyone who knows me is aware how much I love music. All my life, I have strived to acquire the best-quality recordings of my favorite artists. I listen for the slightest nuances of difference. I focus on each individual instrument or voice as much as I can. In the 1960s, when many of my friends had simple mono record players, I explored the two-channel wonder of stereo. Int he 1970s, quadraphonic music was an obsession for me, and I spent far more than I could afford to add a quad amplifier and turntable to my audio system. Int he 1980s, MTV introduced me to basic surround sound; a few years later, almost every stereo amplifier added a surround synthesizer to create the illusion of four-channel audio from two channel recordings. In the 1990s, I began to seek out five-channel audio on laserdisc and DVD. In the early 2000s, I immersed myself in DVD-Audio (which is decidedly different from the audio track on a DVD) and Super Audio CDs with surround mixes. More recently, I have added a lot of Atmos recordings to my collection of blu-ray audio. I am absolutely hooked on finding the perfect means of hearing every voice, every instrument, every echo, every resonance, every reverb...

So imagine my dismay when, after attending an outrageously over-amplified concert on May 16th, I discovered a day or two later that my hearing had been severely affected by the excessive volume.

I should have gone prepared with high-quality sound-reducing earplugs, of course--but it never occurred to me that a small performance in a local restaurant might be amplified to a volume that could overload a high school auditorium. I tried using wadded up bits of paper towel, which helped a little—but not enough, obviously.

The first sign I had that something was wrong was when we were watching the rerun of a Friends episode two days later. A couple of minutes into it, I thought that my Atmos surround system was malfunctioning. I was hearing distorted, tinny echoes of the characters' voices coming from behind me, it seemed. Sounds coming from my right were overloaded, boomy, and almost painful, even though the volume was relatively low. Karen assured me that everything sounded normal.

A few days later, I was startled when Karen put her hand on my right shoulder as I worked at the computer. She had spoken to me from my right side several times, but I had never heard her and had no ideas she was even there.

We sleep with a white noise generator/soiund machine that provides an ebb-and-flow wave sound throughout the night.  I turn over and over like a rotisserie chicken when I sleep, so I split time between my back, my right side, and my left side. As I lay there after waking up, I realized that if I was on my left side with my left ear fully pressed into the pillow, I couldn't hear the sound machine at all.

However, the hearing wasn't ˆ. The faintest bit of bass boomed into my right ear until it sounded like that annoying car you can't wait to get away from at a red light. Upper-register treble sounds were sharp and irritating, like some sort of siren. Voices were distorted, as if I was listening to them with water in my ears.

About four weeks after the incident, we joined a friend for karaoke, which Karen loves. Even with noise-limiting Eargasm ear plugs, the volume seemed excessively loud and horribly distorted. Even when the volume was more tolerable, I had trouble following conversations because I could not isolate voices from distorted background noise.

I hit a real low after that. Music means so much to me, and now I couldn't enjoy it. I felt as if a vital part of my life had been taken away. I became aware that the continual frustration was leaving me depressed and angry, and had to make a real effort to control it so that I wasn't making life miserable for Karen and other people I see on a regular basis (I know I wasn't wholly successful in that regard, but I wasn't even aware for a while what effect all this was having on me). I had trouble sleeping because I kept struggling to hear the sound machine, or the air conditioning, or the fan that I sleep with every night.

"Give it some time and it will go away," several people told me. It didn't. I finally went to see a doctor. I told him that the problem had improved, but it hadn't gone away. It had been at its best during the six days we were at Disney, where we were near sea level. The night we drove back to our home, which is 1074 feet above sea level, I had a lot more distortion and discomfort the first night, although it returned to its pre-vacation level by the second night.

He did a number of tests. He said that I haven't lost any hearing--tests verified that I could indeed hear even very faint sounds at all frequencies. The problem was the fidelity of that sound; I was hearing distortion like a blown-out speaker at some frequencies, and it didn't follow a normal pattern. At some frequencies, I heard more distortion in low-volume sounds than I did at higher volumes. At other frequencies, I heard low volumes very accurately but heard distortion at higher volumes. And at some frequencies, I heard no problems at any volumes.

The good news is that my hearing does seem to be improving now, more than nine weeks after the event that caused the problem. The doctor said that that gave him some hope that it might continue to improve and gradually return to normal. But he said that correcting the problem would be difficult because it didn't follow a typical pattern. Hearing aids, he said, aren't designed to correct narrow-frequency-range distortion at mutliple frequencies without impacting the frequencies that I hear normally.

It has continued to improve. I can now hear the sound machine, and some low levels of bass and upper-register treble are less intrusive than they were, but it isn't back to normal.

Tonight, shortly after dark, I went for a two-mile walk to get in my five miles for the day (I had an appointment this morning, so didn't get to do my first walk). On the way home, as I neared my driveway, I heard the hoot of an owl, followed by the plaintive cry of a coyote. For the first time in a while, I felt like I could hear the sounds normally--and I could tell that one came from the woods to my left, behind my house, while the other came from the uphill woods to my right and somewhat in front of me, in the woods behind a neighbor's house. I welcomed the call of both the owl and the coyote, because they told me that I was hearing those frequencies, at least, in undistorted and equally balanced stereo.

I listened to the tree frogs, or crickets, or whatever it is that makes those midsummer night chirping sounds (my parents never could agree on which it was). I could hear them all around me, and if I turned to face the other way, I heard the sound equally well from the opposing ears as I faced the other direction.

I came in and listened to some music (Eric Tingstad and Nancy Rumbel... always a good choice when I need to unwind a bit), and I heard the stereo more than I have in a while. There is still some distortion, but I really believe it's not as bad as it was even a week ago.

Will it get back to normal? I have no idea... only a hope. But when depression or frustration attempts to ambush me again, I'll try to remember how bad it was, and how it has gotten better, and I'll try to fight off that ambush. 

There's still a lot of music I want to hear, after all.