Up until last year, I had always heard music pretty well because I had a lot of good residual low tone hearing left. OK- I admit that I didn’t hear the full spectrum of music in any particular song, but I got enough that it was enjoyable, and often recognizable. In early 2011 I downloaded a bunch of new music to my iPod in anticipation of the new Bluetooth equipment I had just purchased for my hearing aids. It was great! For about a month. . .
Early last spring I began to notice a significant change in my hearing. The operas that I loved were a struggle to get through. Suddenly music wasn’t making any sense to me. It sounded like . . . Bleah. . . NOISE! A few times I fell asleep during performances! I tried adjusting my hearing aids and fiddled with the staticky FM systems they let you borrow downstairs. All too often I gave up in frustration and turned my hearing aids off.
The sounds I heard coming out of my hearing aids were indescribably painful. I had no words to express what I was hearing. I am pretty sure these sounds only exist in the world of mangled cochleas and power aids.
I realized I had lost hearing but thought it would simply be a matter of programming. But apparently I had reached the point where my programming window was too small. My hearing aid audiologist actually refused to do another hearing test until I was re-evaluated for a cochlear implant.
I had been avoiding the full cochlear implant because I knew a lot of instruments fell in the areas where I had low tone hearing. This is probably the best illustration of the range of sound musical instruments cover.
Many instruments have a wide range of sound, and much lower hertz than speech. My hearing was not too bad below 1000 hertz. With hearing aids I got decent musical sound to about Middle C or above on a piano keyboard, which would be C4. Unlike a lot of people I was almost more concerned about the sound of music than speech. (Unfortunately my link here didn’t upload well. Here it is if you want to look at it. http://onefryshort.org/images/frequency_chart_lg.gif )
Internet research wasn’t very reassuring. T., my hearing aid guy who I’ve known for twenty-five years said I would still have my other side to fall back on if I got a cochlear implant that didn‘t pick up music well enough. Ultimately he thought I might end up with a nice full sound between my two ears if I got a CI, but he wasn’t sure. S., the cochlear implant audiologist, said it takes practice to process music. The more you practice the better your ear gets at making sense of what it’s hearing. But there are no guarantees, she admitted. Everyone is different.
What finally convinced me to take the leap was that I realized my hearing aids weren‘t doing much for me at all. Driving around in my car I had to turn the music up so loud to hear it I could feel the base pulsing on the gas pedal through my shoes. Was I hearing it, or just feeling it?? I wasn’t sure.
For weeks I drove around listening to the car radio, first with one ear turned off, then with the next turned off trying to determine which ear sounded more distorted with my hearing aids, and which processed the best music by itself. I chose my left.
My favorite new song–
#1 by Dan Schwartz, Editor, The Hearing Blog on February 2, 2012 - 5:13 am
Kim, you should get a copy of HOPE Notes, by CI user & musician Richard Reed in RI. It is published by Cochlear, and you can find out about it, and a lot more, in The Hearing Blog in Auditory Therapy: The Missing Ingredient, which will also have many other free & paid resources for you, chief among them LACE by Neurotone.
#2 by kim on February 3, 2012 - 7:44 pm
Thank you Dan. I checked your link and discovered that the audiology clinic I go to is a LACE provider! I have heard good things about LACE.