Are you able to "hear" certain instruments, and not others? I was going to ask about the human voice in song, but you've already answered that with this video.
I’m sorry I’m late in responding, but real life interferes, especially with the mood.
I don’t really “hear,†in the same sense that hearing people hear, and oftentimes it’s been speculated that things I “hear†are actually created in this imagination, which I suppose is eminently possible.
As some have seen from childhood photographs of myself posted here, I was born without ear canals and ear-drums; franksolich is medically classified as an “environmental accident,†as the absence of ears was caused by my mother, a registered nurse, alas grabbing a wrong bar of hand-soap when pregnant with me. I’m one of those “Accutane babies†the social architects and women’s-libbers think should’ve been terminated before I began to live.
Bah, humbug. I will match my “quality of life†with the quality of life of any primitive—any primitive, period—and I quite reasonably suspect mine has been better than theirs, loads and mountains better.
But anyway, so I can’t hear a damned thing the way hearing people hear.
However, there’s bone conduction, the conduction of sound through the skeletal structure. Every human has the ability to use such a thing, but since most people can hear the usual and normal way, they never bother discovering and utilizing it.
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By an odd quirk of chance, I was born into a musical family; only my mother, an older brother, and I never sang, never used a musical instrument. Everybody else did, though. The talent came from my father, who when in high school received a full-ride scholarship to Wittenberg College in Ohio, in music, both vocal and instrumental. (But because of other circumstances he left after a year there, and ultimately went into nursing and hospital administration.)
Growing up in such a family, it was inevitable that I would be aware of music from my earliest years, although obviously I was never quite sure what to do with it.
My parents were big believers in the idea that every problem has a solution, and almost as early as the cradle, I was constantly yanked from one physician to another, from one hospital to another, in attempts to make it possible for me to hear. Of course it was futile; the blood, sweat, tears, money, and hopes involved with that were decades ago, but I still regret that others felt it necessary to expend so much for so little that was ultimately gotten.
Even as an adult, for whatever reasons, I still seem to attract others who want to “do something†for me, most usually “helping†me to “hear.†They appear to think it a particular tragedy, that franksolich “misses out†on “so much.†Ever since my first year in college so many eons ago, friends and acquaintances made it a mission in their lives to devise things that I might be able to use, to “hear.â€
Lately, oh, the past twenty or so years, it’s been people in the music business for whom I’ve done favors in the past. I suppose for people who like music, deafness is more of a misfortune, a tragedy, than for people who don’t much care for it.
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This past May, after being a compulsive chain-smoker of cigarettes, usually 2-3 packages a day excepting the last few years, since I was a teenager in 1978, I finally had the “big one,†and had to quit the habit. Right away. Right then and there.
That heart attack sucked a lot out of me, and now there’s many things I used to do, but can’t do any more. It’s a wretched, miserable, sort of existence, but better to pay for one’s sins in this life than in the next, I think.
One of the things thought a possible morale-builder was that “if only†franksolich could hear, and enjoy music. Having nothing better to do, and in a generally disconsolate mood anyway, I subjected myself to experimentations by a sound engineer from Lincoln.
Of course he’s trying the impossible—there is
no way, no way at all, I’ll ever be able to hear anything close to what normal people hear—but if one labors a mountain, sometimes he brings forth
at least a mouse, and that’s what happened here three weeks ago.
Using bone conduction of sound, knobs on a panel, and headsets that clench the jawbones rather than surround the head, I can now say yes, I am in fact “hearing†better than I ever have in my life.
But actually, what I’m “hearing†is pitifully little, compared with what hearing people hear, and it would take a professional audiologist or ear-physician to decipher whether I’m
really hearing, or if much of it’s just a figment of the imagination. My guess is that about half of what I “hear†is actually made up inside my head, to fill in gaps where I’m not “hearing†anything.
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It’s a lot of time and trouble, and I’m sure most people wouldn’t put up with it. For one, when “hearing,†I can do nothing else. Nothing at all; merely sit there and try to “hear.†It takes a headache-inducing intense concentration. I’m sure that if I were busy trying to “hear†something, the whole house could burn down around me, and I would have no idea, having shut out the whole world outside of this single auditory input.
Instrumental music is one thing, easier to grasp; vocal music requires—if I wish to know about it—a program or transcript or a written-down dialogue, for me to follow the words. To put vocal music in front of me without such an “aid,†one might as well shove a primitive in my face; no matter how hard I try, I’m not going to “get it.â€
Generally, it’s easier dealing with music without words.
The chick from New Zealand singing “God Save the Queen†in the above youtube, I got more out of merely watching the movement of her mouth, than any words she said. However, from the general overall “sound†of it, I got the impression she’s a remarkably talented singer.
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Now, last night, I made a marvelous discovery; I’ll bet cousin nadin’s never even hear of it, even though this deaf person’s been aware of it since I was, oh, about three years old:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM2yUH3E4JAI’m familiar with this because my father used to sing this part in community performances of Handel’s
Messiah throughout central Nebraska when I was a child. I grew up knowing the words by heart, and used it as the ending part (the recessional?) of the funeral for my younger brother. Played and sung by hearing people, of course.
I could be wrong, but I get the impression this guy’s awesome; in fact, this is probably the very best version of this ever recorded anywhere, by anyone. I can’t imagine how it’s possible anyone else can do better than he did.
But how much of it I’m actually and truly hearing, I have no idea; as one knows from reading my short stories here, when describing conversations, I do have a habit of “filling in†words and comments where I might’ve missed something.
