Life with A Test Tone

This coming Wednesday,it will be three weeks since I wreaked my hearing (“Fragile Shadetree-Engineered Mess”). Since then, 4 hours is a good night’s sleep. I have to be exhausted to get that. The 8kHz tone that has been the subtext to my life since the mid-1990’s is so far in the background to the new 6.76kHz (Ab, 8 octaves up from middle C) blast I can barely remember the irritation it used to cause me. It’s there, but more as an harmonic than a second sound.

The 6.76kHz tone is always the loudest thing in any environment I experience now. We went to the Cities yesterday. Our pickup is far from a quiet vehicle, but the 6.76kHz tone was louder than the radio playing NPR variety and game shows in the vehicle. I have to work to ignore it in that environment. Ignoring it at 3AM is impossible. Life with a constant and always dominant, very high Ab is not going to be easy or pleasant. It may not be possible. Living on 3-4 sleep is, at best, not recommended.

At three weeks, I’m ready to try anything. I spent a few hours tonight researching clinical trials. By the time the Republicans are finished with Medicare, I suspect my “insurance” won’t cover ear plugs, let alone actual research or clinical trials. I’d done a lot of research for my MSCM acoustics classes on tinnitus. Since my recent noise exposure, I’ve done a lot more. So far, every area of research seems to have come to a deadend. I wish I could convince myself there is either a cure or hope for one in my lifetime, but every thing I find points hopelessly to silly crap like “mindfullness.” The idea that I will never again experience a quiet moment is beyond depressing.

What Do You Buy?

Earlier this summer, I hauled myself off to a self-funded writing retreat in Thunder Bay, ON, Canada. I gave myself a week to restart old writing habits with the hope of knocking out at least 1,000 words a day and editing 50 pages of any of 3-4 books I’ve had in the works for the last couple of decades. The good news is that those goals were really easily met. The bad news is that I have apparently lost interest in my own words. I came home a couple of days early, slightly discouraged but oddly relieved. After a lifetime of telling myself “you should write books if you want to call yourself a writer,” I am done with that mission.

Part of my disillusionment with the craft and discipline of writing is personal and part is financial. In the last couple of years, I’ve been paring down the things I do to see if there is any passion left in me at 70-years of age. I have been working for money, billing customers and putting in “day job” hours, for 55-plus years. With that motivation removed, it’s hard to remember what I like to do because I’ve spent 90% of my life doing what needed to be done to turn a buck. Even with that background, if I believe that nobody will value my work with a few dollars investment I can’t convince myself the work is worth doing.

Looking at my own unwillingness to part with money for the art I’ve spent much of my life creating—fiction and non-fiction, music, audio electronics—I have to suspect most other consumers feel the same. For example, for 50 years I’ve hauled a fairly substantial library with me from one end of the country to the middle and back, several times. When we moved to Red Wing, 90% of that library was either sold or donated. Practically, the only books I’ve kept have been autographed copies of work that had special meaning to me. A friend owns a used book store and is always trying to convince me to buy something. I just don’t feel the need. My local library has access to anything I want to explore, digitally or on paper, and after I’m done reading a book I’m generally done with it. If I want to read it again, I’ll ask the library to find it for me. My preference is eBooks and I don’t even keep the few eBooks I buy.

The same goes for music. While I have a fairly substantial CD collection, I gave away almost half of what I once owned along with the books. Worse, I almost never listen to the CDs I own, so their position in our home is precarious. I’m mostly happy with Pandora and ripping my CD collection to MP3’s that I listen to while I work in the basement or garage. I’m even happy with that sound source from my ancient SanDisk MP3 player and in-ear monitors when I’m bicycling or walking for exercise. Blasphemy, right? When I want to really explore something new, I order it from my library, listen to it, and give it back. I am totally uninvested in modern music, although I like a lot of it. I just don’t care enough to make it part of my life.

I have never had much of a video collection, but today we might be able to count a dozen movies we still own. Most of those were review copies and a couple are, like our books, signed by the artists involved. Again, I can get all of the movies I want to see through our library.

My wife is a visual artist; a painter and sculptor. We have a house full of her artwork. She is no longer particularly interested in selling her work and while we enjoy the work of many artists, neither of us is interested in acquiring more art for our home. We often prowl art galleries and festivals, but rarely buy anything other than food.

I barely remember the impulse to subsidize artists I respect and enjoy, because the impulse to manage our limited and non-renewable resources rules out that sort of philanthropy. In many ways, “we’ve done enough” comforts us when a twinge of guilt rears its head. So, our lives as consumers of the work that we do ourselves have withered down to the vanishing point. I have to wonder if that is common. If not, why not?

Fragile Shadetree-Engineered Mess

For much of my life, I’ve said that the human hearing mechanism is evidence that if god is an engineer, he’s one lousy manufacturing engineer. Our ears are one cobbled-together mess of mechanical, hydraulic, electrical, and chemical parts. The two smallest, most delicate bones in our body are the coupling between the outer and inner ear drums. They can be dislodged by the impact of a simple fall at any point in your life. The outer ear drum is plagued with all sorts of infection and perforation opportunities.

Practically all of the information we define as “sound” is made up of complex collections of audio (20Hz to 20kHz, is generally described as the human hearing frequency response) frequencies. There are root, or fundamental, tones and their associated harmonic frequencies; which we often define as “musical signals.” There are noise signals, which often have non-harmonically related frequency content along with more identifiable harmonic content.

The most delicate of all the components are the cilia, the “hairs,” that line the cochlear. Those tiny hair cells are the devices our hearing uses to convert air waves into specific audio signals to be decoded in our brain. Those tiny sterocilia are the devices required to convert air motion (sound) into electrical signals sent to our brains. Different areas of the cochlea are responsible for different frequency ranges and each of those areas are made up of a collection of rows of cilia which are responsible for very specific frequencies.

One of the most typical symptoms of damaged cilia is “tinnitus”: the perception of noise or ringing in the ear. Sometimes, tinnitus means you have done temporary damage, but often it means you have done permanent damage to a specific area of your cochlea. You may have lost the ability to hear the frequencies you are being cursed with “hearing” all of the time. Because those missing or damaged cilia are no longer sending the appropriate auditory nerve signals to your brain and your brain is “cranking up the gain” in an attempt to compensate for the reduced output. In electronic systems, when amplifier gain is increased beyond the point of stability, oscillation occurs: ie. the perception of noise or ringing in the ear.

Unfortunately for us, nothing in nature prepared our hearing mechanism for the abuse we would be subjecting it to in modern life. Outside of landslides, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornados there is nothing in nature as loud as the kind of crap we subject ourselves to every day with vehicles and traffic (loud pipes destroy lives), industrial noise, and modern music from the usual sources: speakers and headphones. The 120dBSPL+ levels we are regularly subjected to is far more than enough to cause permanent damage to practically every fragile area of our hearing mechanism, particularly the cilia.

Twenty years ago, I had reconstructive nasal surgery in an attempt to fix the damage of being my father’s failed student’s punching bag from when I was about 12 until around 17 when I made the decision to make every fight I was forced to participate in into a fight to the death or dismemberment. By then, my nose had been broken so many times, air could not pass through the left side at all and barely squeezed through a convoluted slit in the right side. The surgery was more complicated than the surgeon anticipated and probably needed a second pass. However, about a week after the surgery, a sneeze caused the right side to hemorrhage and I woke up pouring blood from my nose. I went to an emergency room, where a doctor inserted a 4” long piece of stiff absorptive gauze into my nose. Later, my surgeon replaced that with an inflatable device that forced the blood flow into my sinus cavity and nearly burst my ear drum. After a day of intense pain, I deflated the device and decided I’d rather bleed to death than have my hearing destroyed. In the end, I was stuck with an 8kHz ring, tinnitus, in my right ear. Over the years, that noise slowly reduced in volume, but it has been close to intolerable often.

Last night, at a local bar’s open mic, I slipped up and went unprotected, no hearing protection. I sat in the stupidest possible place in that bar, near the FOH speakers, and possibly did permanent damage to my hearing. When I got home, the volume of the tinnitus was the worst I’ve ever experienced in twenty years. I woke up at 4AM the next morning with approximately the same volume of noise. I am desperately hoping that I did temporary damage and it might go away with time. Tinnitus is intolerable for someone who has spent his whole life primarily driven and directed by hearing, sound, and music. I’ve put up with that damn background 8kHz for 20 years. This is not a background noise. It is front-and-center the loudest thing in any room I am in. If you want to know why I am such an opponent of pointless amplification, get into my head for a few hours and you’ll be ready to shoot anyone who fools with a volume control.