{"id":3860,"date":"2012-01-04T08:20:48","date_gmt":"2012-01-04T16:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.everhear.com\/?p=3860"},"modified":"2024-11-26T10:56:16","modified_gmt":"2024-11-26T18:56:16","slug":"how-do-musicians-cope-with-hearing-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/how-do-musicians-cope-with-hearing-loss\/","title":{"rendered":"How do musicians cope with hearing loss?"},"content":{"rendered":"

We’re big music fans here at ESHC, and are constantly promoting hearing conservation, especially for musicians who rely on hearing for their livelihood. We were sent an article by Anwen Greenaway from the <\/span>Oxford University Press<\/a> that eloquently put into words the struggles musicians and composers experience from hearing loss. Below is the article in entirety:<\/span><\/h4>\n

<\/strong>Hearing is clearly the most important sense for a musician, particularly a composer, so the trauma of experiencing difficulties with this sense is hard to imagine. Beethoven famously suffered deteriorating hearing for much of his adult life; an affliction which brought him to despair at times. The cause of his deafness is still unknown, although much speculated upon, but the composer\u2019s feelings about his situation are well-documented: Beethoven kept \u2018Conversation Books\u2019 full of discussions of his music and other issues which give a unique insight into his thoughts, and in a letter to his brothers (the\u00a0Heiligenstadt Testament<\/em>) he wrote a heart-wrenching description of his sense of despair and isolation caused by his inability to hear.<\/p>\n

Despite his catastrophic loss of hearing\u00a0Beethoven <\/a>continued to compose \u2014 producing some of the greatest works in Western musical history. So how was this possible? How can a musician, particularly a composer, continue without full, or even hyper-sensitive, hearing?<\/p>\n

We can get a modern day insight from Michael Berkeley \u2014 one of OUP\u2019s composers who, over recent years, has been struggling with hearing troubles himself. Berkeley\u2019s hearing damage was the result of a blocked ear, brought on by a fairly minor cold, which has caused irreparable nerve damage. These days there\u2019s better help available to sufferers of hearing loss. However, sound distortion remains a problem, and hearing aids can only help so far, as Berkeley explains:<\/p>\n

\u201cMusic was appallingly distorted, and in fact I couldn\u2019t go to concerts as it was just so painful. I got a condition called\u00a0hyperacusis<\/a>, where loud sounds are unbearably painful. I got some very good digital hearing aids which made a great difference to speech, but it can only amplify what I\u2019m already hearing so it didn\u2019t help for music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Berkeley explains how he continued to write music:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you are trained as a composer you can write in your head: you hear the sounds internally, and you\u2019ve been trained how to get those sounds onto the page without a piano or any intermediary. It\u2019s something you learn to do gradually through lots of hard work and by instinct. The problem is, when the music is played back I can\u2019t comment very usefully: what I hear may not be what the conductor or the rest of the audience hear\u2026it could be my hearing disability is distorting the real sound.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe extraordinary thing is, I realised after a number of months that I was beginning to hear music more clearly. I remember there was a\u00a0Haydn<\/a> string quartet on, and I suddenly realised I was hearing it better: I was so overjoyed that I went to bed with an iPod and played it all night long! Apparently what can happen is that the brain begins to rewire itself. We hear with our brains \u2014 the ear is essentially a conduit \u2014 so if you have a template of musical knowledge then the brain begins to compensate for the distortions. My brain is learning to reprocess sound, and so it\u2019s like discovering music anew: it\u2019s absolutely wonderful!<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always thought that less is more. In Beethoven\u2019s late music, particularly the late string quartets, the music is pared down to the absolute essentials, and I now find in my writing, partly because I can hear better when I play it back, that I\u2019m beginning to concentrate much more on the essence of the sound and try to rid it of extraneous notes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do feel that the music I\u2019ve written in these last two years is actually as good as everything I\u2019d written up until then: hopefully better.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We’re big music fans here at ESHC, and are constantly promoting hearing conservation, especially for musicians who rely on hearing for their livelihood. We were sent an article by Anwen Greenaway from the Oxford University Press that eloquently put into words the struggles musicians and composers experience from hearing loss. Below is the article in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"How do musicians cope with hearing loss?","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","schema":"","fname":"","lname":"","position":"","credentials":"","placeID":"","no_match":false,"name":"","company":"","review":"","address":"","city":"","state":"","zip":"","lat":"","lng":"","phone1":"","phone2":"","fax":"","mon1":"","mon2":"","tue1":"","tue2":"","wed1":"","wed2":"","thu1":"","thu2":"","fri1":"","fri2":"","sat1":"","sat2":"","sun1":"","sun2":"","hours-note":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[741,742,12,36,743],"class_list":["post-3860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hearing","tag-beethoven","tag-berkeley","tag-hearing","tag-musician","tag-struggle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3860"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12236,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3860\/revisions\/12236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everhear.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}