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Five weeks later, I was in my audiologist’s office to have my new ear turned on by getting the external processor. It had taken me months to learn to hear speech again with my first ear, so I wasn’t expecting perfect clarity from the start. The right ear had gone unstimulated for much longer than the left, so it had more catching up to do.
It is, as fur as he knuzz, th’ only wy of coming downstrrrs, but sumtimes he fils that there rilly is another wy, if only hih could stop bumping for a mument and think of it. And then he fls that purhaps there iznt. Unyhw, here hih is at the bottom, and ready to be intriduced to yu. Winnie-the-Pooh.
The “missing” vowels threw me off; I could follow the voice only by reading along with the text. The implant was in fact giving me the vowels. I just couldn’t hear them yet, because I hadn’t learned to recognize the way they were being picked up by the nerves. That would come with time, practice, and tweaks of the software. I would have to go back to the audiologist several times over the next six months to get the software to fit just right to the ear.
But the ear was already pulling its weight. The next day I went to a café with two friends. Even though my new ear couldn’t have understood them on its own, it backed up the other ear. An “s” heard by my left ear was matched by a sensation of crispness in the right, making it more definitively an “s.” It made it much easier for me to hear them amidst the yammering of the patrons and the yowling of the cappuccino machine.
Here’s an analogy. Say that hearing’s like walking a narrow beam across a river. It helps to have a rope on one side to hold onto—that’s like having one ear. But having a rope on both sides makes the trek firmer and more solid; a sway in one direction can be corrected by pushing on the other. It let me relax and enjoy the conversation instead of having to struggle for each phoneme.
And then I tried music. I started with Debussy’s Clair de lune, a slow, reflective piece played by an oboe and a harp. I could feel the new ear feeding me its version of the soundstream. It didn’t sound as limpid and clear as the left, but it was giving me music, mirroring the left. Mirroring? Actually, no, I realized. The headphones were shifting the sound intensities back and forth between them, playing off of each other.
Stereo.
And I was caught up in it: following the contours of the piece, its wholeness, its probing of the emotional resonances of sound; a moonlit glade with the stars wheeling overhead.
“It sounds lovely,” I breathed.
Wow.
It held my attention the way a good story does. I listened to it three more times, once with only the right, once only with the left, then once with both again. Disassembling and reassembling the piece.
I realized that listening to music with one ear is essentially pointless. Music reaches into you and works on your brain. To do that, it needs to work on all of the brain. Hearing music with only one ear engages only half of the brain. Hearing Clair de lune with two ears was like the difference between a live and a dead body: the form was the same, but the experience was oh so different.
April 30, 2008
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-living_in_stereo.html
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