Cochlear Implants International An Interdisciplinary Journal
ISSN: 1467-0100 (Print) 1754-7628 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycii20
Cochlear implant music: A first-person perspective Richard Reed To cite this article: Richard Reed (2015) Cochlear implant music: A first-person perspective, Cochlear Implants International, 16:sup3, S3-S4 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1467010015Z.000000000259
Published online: 02 Jun 2015.
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Date: 02 March 2016, At: 17:02
Cochlear implant music: A first-person perspective Richard Reed Musician and CI user, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 17:02 02 March 2016
The memory of things gone is important to a Jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something said long ago. – Louis Armstrong My cochlear implant (CI) allows me to once again play Hammond organ and piano on Blues, Rock and Roll, Folk, and Pop songs. And to listen to those kinds of things, too. In the years since I got mine, more and more CI users have reported enjoying and playing music. ‘It doesn’t make sense on paper!’ even now. But neither does love. Except for some still and perhaps forever complex-to-my-ear Classical and Jazz pieces, many melodies, lyrics, beats, even chords – and infinite combinations thereof – are once again, blissfully, just music. My CI activation was in November 2002. It took 2 years post-activation for music to seem less noisy and truly enjoyable. By small increments, with external device and software upgrades, it is still getting better. There was a week this February when I played four nights in-a-row, in four different bands and venues. As a late-deafened adult in the 1990s, I used to dream about having that kind of exhausting-in-agood-way week again. Of course, those sweet-sounding dreams never included driving home at 2 am in a snowstorm. While some of my memories are seen through rose-colored glasses, some others are heard through peach-colored analog hearing aids. The cold reality of waking up unavoidably deaf from a great sounding dream was a dreary way to start any day. These days, when I wake from dreaming about music, I can pop on my external device and try to capture the notes on the piano. More often than not, somewhere between my bed and the keyboard, dreamy ethereal melodies melt into something much more mundane or, alas, something way too familiar, no blurred lines about it. Light-of-day shortcomings aside, they sound fine, amazingly ‘normal’. Music may never sound as natural as it did before I lost my hearing, but it is a million times better than it was on activation day. Correspondence to: E-mail: [email protected]
© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015 DOI 10.1179/1467010015Z.000000000259
I have now been a CI user for longer than I was deaf. So there are whole decades between my memories of ‘real’ music and what has become increasingly normal CI music. There are a lot of keys on the keyring to the CI music kingdom; and every CI user’s figurative castle has different locks. For me, the time spent listening to or playing music, and the time between when I had great natural hearing and great CI hearing, unlocked the heaviest doors. I could not help but half-forget what music used to sound like, or what it is supposed to sound like. It all sounds like music now. I cannot enjoy it all, but who on Earth can? In my memory, which is imperfect even as it perfects and protects some memories while re-imagining or erasing others, activation day remains incredibly vivid. It helps that I have described it too many times at universities and audiology conventions. Using a digital sampler, I demonstrate for audiences what I think I heard, what I now so clearly remember hearing, at the piano within an hour after activation. It is difficult to describe on virtual paper without dripping it in onomatopoeia. The piano notes buzzed, blared, belched, and bubbled; seemingly did everything a sound can do except sound good. Music was not remotely musical, all loud, dissonant, warbling, percussive noises. Every off-putting and pathos-inducing description you have heard or read is valid: music through a CI sounded unimaginably horrible, at first. Of all the words we use to describe the CI music improvement process – practice, tweak, upgrade, comfort, history, pitch, equalization, threshold, patience, sample, memory, rate, etc., the most important one has got to be neuroplasticity. If not for neuroplasticity, my CI results could not have improved much beyond activation. Then again, without neuroplasticity, limited pitch perception would be among the very least of my problems. I do not understand the biology of it beyond this: whether our ears are of flesh and blood or titanium, the ancient adage is wrong, you can teach an old dog new tricks. It just takes a lot longer. For adults with strong aural
Cochlear Implants International
2015
VOL.
16
NO.
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S3
Reed
Cochlear implant music
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 17:02 02 March 2016
memories, that entails no little amount of frustration. On the plus side, improving music with a CI does not take a genius. And I can prove that. At one of the aforementioned four-in-a-row February gigs, singer/songwriter Mark Cutler started playing Lou Reed’s ‘Sweet Jane’ on electric guitar. The guys in the band had only a few seconds to grin at each other before we were supposed to join in. Mark mostly writes his own material, so we had not planned on this. Maybe someone requested it? Maybe he just felt like playing that simple, beautiful, classic raunchy rock riff. What key is it in? Many guitar-playing CI research scientists and/or audiologists (a surprisingly large number) might know the answer. In a much shorter timeframe than it takes to tell, I had to remember. Name most rock and roll classics, and my hands can probably go to the general vicinity of the correct notes, which is nearly always close enough. ‘Gloria’? Key of E. ‘Wild Thing’? Key of A. ‘The Weight’? Key of G. ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘Midnight Hour’? Both in the key of D (and both start on C). That night, not wanting to spoil the vibe by thinking, I let my hands choose the key of A. Alas, like the hero in an old love song, muscle memories sometimes fail. ‘Sweet Jane’ is not in the key of A, it is in the key of D. Never mind the plot, the very air in the room thickens. And not in a good way. There was a din, sure, but nothing unusual there. I like the din. It has grown on me over the years. Below, above, or within the din though, was Jimmy the bass player out of tune? Like … way out? He never is. Could neon lights hum that loudly? Every neon light in town? We played the riff twice, and it did not get any better that second time through. Oddly, there was something about the aural mishmash that did not bother me; but there was not time to dwell on positives. The difference in facial contortions between a musician who is really ‘in the moment’ and one who is horrified is not subtle. In real time, it only took a few seconds, along with a few strident stage whispers of ‘D! D!’ from Mark, to switch to the correct key; and the oddly sour titular
S4
Cochlear Implants International
2015
VOL.
16
NO.
S3
Jane was suddenly sweet again. Folks on the dance floor had not seemed to notice. How is that possible? They love that beat. And, like the beat, the song and the night went on. But those few messy measures had burned into my brain. Every hearing person who has survived even a minor car accident remembers the sound it made. No one likes that sound, but everyone remembers it. Yet some people like a Demolition Derby, wherein drivers intentionally crash their beat-up cars into each other. And they love that sound. ‘Sweet Jane’ played by four guys in two different keys sounds a bit like the drawn-out climax of a Demolition Derby, rhythmically improved, yes, but with a crunchy dissonance all its own. A peculiar and cool thing happened the next day at home. I played ‘Sweet Jane’ on the piano in the key of D with my left hand. The memory stung. All alone and still I blushed. I will spare you any muttered Rock and Roll vernacular. After taking a deep cleansing breath, I played it again, but with my right hand, and in the wrong key, in A. How could I have been so far off the night before? Well, those chords do have notes in common, and at a loud volume, harmonics fly. Still. Ouch. On a lark, I began playing it in both keys at the same time, which was surprisingly difficult at first, as each hand wanted to do what the other was doing. Even at a low living room volume, harmonics flew again. I slowed it way down and better realized what I was hearing. An A chord over a D chord is a kind of elaborate DMajor7th chord. Lou Reed (no relation, he would surely appreciate my mentioning) would roll over in his urn. With some few melodic exceptions over the years, a Major7th chord is not a particularly rock and roll sound, not a gritty downtown New York City sound by any stretch. But slowly and repeatedly playing ‘Sweet Jane’ on the piano in two different keys reminded me, once again, that I can get used to anything. Anything. And that is probably a bigger clue to my enjoyment of CI music than if I somehow got things right the first time every time.
ISSN: 1467-0100 (Print) 1754-7628 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycii20
Cochlear implant music: A first-person perspective Richard Reed To cite this article: Richard Reed (2015) Cochlear implant music: A first-person perspective, Cochlear Implants International, 16:sup3, S3-S4 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/1467010015Z.000000000259
Published online: 02 Jun 2015.
Submit your article to this journal
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ycii20 Download by: [University of California, San Diego]
Date: 02 March 2016, At: 17:02
Cochlear implant music: A first-person perspective Richard Reed Musician and CI user, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 17:02 02 March 2016
The memory of things gone is important to a Jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something said long ago. – Louis Armstrong My cochlear implant (CI) allows me to once again play Hammond organ and piano on Blues, Rock and Roll, Folk, and Pop songs. And to listen to those kinds of things, too. In the years since I got mine, more and more CI users have reported enjoying and playing music. ‘It doesn’t make sense on paper!’ even now. But neither does love. Except for some still and perhaps forever complex-to-my-ear Classical and Jazz pieces, many melodies, lyrics, beats, even chords – and infinite combinations thereof – are once again, blissfully, just music. My CI activation was in November 2002. It took 2 years post-activation for music to seem less noisy and truly enjoyable. By small increments, with external device and software upgrades, it is still getting better. There was a week this February when I played four nights in-a-row, in four different bands and venues. As a late-deafened adult in the 1990s, I used to dream about having that kind of exhausting-in-agood-way week again. Of course, those sweet-sounding dreams never included driving home at 2 am in a snowstorm. While some of my memories are seen through rose-colored glasses, some others are heard through peach-colored analog hearing aids. The cold reality of waking up unavoidably deaf from a great sounding dream was a dreary way to start any day. These days, when I wake from dreaming about music, I can pop on my external device and try to capture the notes on the piano. More often than not, somewhere between my bed and the keyboard, dreamy ethereal melodies melt into something much more mundane or, alas, something way too familiar, no blurred lines about it. Light-of-day shortcomings aside, they sound fine, amazingly ‘normal’. Music may never sound as natural as it did before I lost my hearing, but it is a million times better than it was on activation day. Correspondence to: E-mail: [email protected]
© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015 DOI 10.1179/1467010015Z.000000000259
I have now been a CI user for longer than I was deaf. So there are whole decades between my memories of ‘real’ music and what has become increasingly normal CI music. There are a lot of keys on the keyring to the CI music kingdom; and every CI user’s figurative castle has different locks. For me, the time spent listening to or playing music, and the time between when I had great natural hearing and great CI hearing, unlocked the heaviest doors. I could not help but half-forget what music used to sound like, or what it is supposed to sound like. It all sounds like music now. I cannot enjoy it all, but who on Earth can? In my memory, which is imperfect even as it perfects and protects some memories while re-imagining or erasing others, activation day remains incredibly vivid. It helps that I have described it too many times at universities and audiology conventions. Using a digital sampler, I demonstrate for audiences what I think I heard, what I now so clearly remember hearing, at the piano within an hour after activation. It is difficult to describe on virtual paper without dripping it in onomatopoeia. The piano notes buzzed, blared, belched, and bubbled; seemingly did everything a sound can do except sound good. Music was not remotely musical, all loud, dissonant, warbling, percussive noises. Every off-putting and pathos-inducing description you have heard or read is valid: music through a CI sounded unimaginably horrible, at first. Of all the words we use to describe the CI music improvement process – practice, tweak, upgrade, comfort, history, pitch, equalization, threshold, patience, sample, memory, rate, etc., the most important one has got to be neuroplasticity. If not for neuroplasticity, my CI results could not have improved much beyond activation. Then again, without neuroplasticity, limited pitch perception would be among the very least of my problems. I do not understand the biology of it beyond this: whether our ears are of flesh and blood or titanium, the ancient adage is wrong, you can teach an old dog new tricks. It just takes a lot longer. For adults with strong aural
Cochlear Implants International
2015
VOL.
16
NO.
S3
S3
Reed
Cochlear implant music
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 17:02 02 March 2016
memories, that entails no little amount of frustration. On the plus side, improving music with a CI does not take a genius. And I can prove that. At one of the aforementioned four-in-a-row February gigs, singer/songwriter Mark Cutler started playing Lou Reed’s ‘Sweet Jane’ on electric guitar. The guys in the band had only a few seconds to grin at each other before we were supposed to join in. Mark mostly writes his own material, so we had not planned on this. Maybe someone requested it? Maybe he just felt like playing that simple, beautiful, classic raunchy rock riff. What key is it in? Many guitar-playing CI research scientists and/or audiologists (a surprisingly large number) might know the answer. In a much shorter timeframe than it takes to tell, I had to remember. Name most rock and roll classics, and my hands can probably go to the general vicinity of the correct notes, which is nearly always close enough. ‘Gloria’? Key of E. ‘Wild Thing’? Key of A. ‘The Weight’? Key of G. ‘Proud Mary’ and ‘Midnight Hour’? Both in the key of D (and both start on C). That night, not wanting to spoil the vibe by thinking, I let my hands choose the key of A. Alas, like the hero in an old love song, muscle memories sometimes fail. ‘Sweet Jane’ is not in the key of A, it is in the key of D. Never mind the plot, the very air in the room thickens. And not in a good way. There was a din, sure, but nothing unusual there. I like the din. It has grown on me over the years. Below, above, or within the din though, was Jimmy the bass player out of tune? Like … way out? He never is. Could neon lights hum that loudly? Every neon light in town? We played the riff twice, and it did not get any better that second time through. Oddly, there was something about the aural mishmash that did not bother me; but there was not time to dwell on positives. The difference in facial contortions between a musician who is really ‘in the moment’ and one who is horrified is not subtle. In real time, it only took a few seconds, along with a few strident stage whispers of ‘D! D!’ from Mark, to switch to the correct key; and the oddly sour titular
S4
Cochlear Implants International
2015
VOL.
16
NO.
S3
Jane was suddenly sweet again. Folks on the dance floor had not seemed to notice. How is that possible? They love that beat. And, like the beat, the song and the night went on. But those few messy measures had burned into my brain. Every hearing person who has survived even a minor car accident remembers the sound it made. No one likes that sound, but everyone remembers it. Yet some people like a Demolition Derby, wherein drivers intentionally crash their beat-up cars into each other. And they love that sound. ‘Sweet Jane’ played by four guys in two different keys sounds a bit like the drawn-out climax of a Demolition Derby, rhythmically improved, yes, but with a crunchy dissonance all its own. A peculiar and cool thing happened the next day at home. I played ‘Sweet Jane’ on the piano in the key of D with my left hand. The memory stung. All alone and still I blushed. I will spare you any muttered Rock and Roll vernacular. After taking a deep cleansing breath, I played it again, but with my right hand, and in the wrong key, in A. How could I have been so far off the night before? Well, those chords do have notes in common, and at a loud volume, harmonics fly. Still. Ouch. On a lark, I began playing it in both keys at the same time, which was surprisingly difficult at first, as each hand wanted to do what the other was doing. Even at a low living room volume, harmonics flew again. I slowed it way down and better realized what I was hearing. An A chord over a D chord is a kind of elaborate DMajor7th chord. Lou Reed (no relation, he would surely appreciate my mentioning) would roll over in his urn. With some few melodic exceptions over the years, a Major7th chord is not a particularly rock and roll sound, not a gritty downtown New York City sound by any stretch. But slowly and repeatedly playing ‘Sweet Jane’ on the piano in two different keys reminded me, once again, that I can get used to anything. Anything. And that is probably a bigger clue to my enjoyment of CI music than if I somehow got things right the first time every time.
