Introduction

Towards the end of my professional career, I became hard of hearing. The change was gradual and for a while, I made do without hearing aids, but eventually, I started wearing behind-the-ear aids. These days I wear them all day, every day. Unfortunately, I discovered that I was no longer able to participate fully in social gatherings and I lost the ability to appreciate music. Music became distorted. Music had always been a big part of my life and in 2012, I tried to discover the fundamental cause of the distortion. My search sent me to London to discuss with a senior audiologist in a leading hospital; to Zurich for similar discussions with researchers at Phonak, a leading developer and manufacturer of hearing aids; to the audiology department of my local hospital who sent me for an MRI scan; and finally, to a PhD research student in the Auditory Perception Group within the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University: all to no avail.

At the first 2012 Cambridge University meeting, I was asked a question that, at the time, I couldn’t answer objectively – how does music sound to you? Subsequently, I conducted some experiments at home and wrote the following essay – The Sound of Music: How Does Music Sound to Me? – but it was another three years before I started my blogging website and the essay lay dormant and forgotten in one of my folders on my laptop and never made it onto my website.

In 2017, I attended a Hearing Aids for Music conference organised by the Music Department at Leeds University. I spoke at length about my distortion issues with the organiser, Alinka Greasley, Associate Professor in Music Psychology. Alinka became very interested and invited me to post a shortened version of my essay on her department’s website. This I did. You can find it here: https://musicandhearingaids.org/2018/03/02/how-does-music-sound-to-me/

I thought no more about this publication until I started receiving emails – twelve to date (November 2023) from people who had found the Leeds University version and who then contacted me saying they too had this same problem, or a slight variant, and asking if I had ever got to the bottom of why music sounded distorted once my hearing went down. I haven’t, but I’ve had some revealing discussions. In Part 2 of this posting, I will summarise what has emerged since the publication of the Leeds University version of my original 2012 essay. But, before I do so, I think now is the time to place the full version of my article in the public domain on my website. Here it is, with minor corrections:

The Sound of Music: How Does Music Sound to Me?
Ben Bennetts
23 November 2012

Background

I have listened to and enjoyed music all my life. The early rock and roll greats of the late ’50s and early ’60s sparked the interest. Performers such as Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley (his early music), the Everly Brothers, Bill Haley, Fats Domino and so on got me started.   I was then introduced to classical music at my boarding school in the late ‘50s by ‘Drip’ Drennan, the Geography teacher.   Drip was passionate about classical music and ran an after-class music appreciation society of which, eventually, I became the secretary. From these two vantage points, rock and roll and classical music, I expanded my musical interests. As I travelled worldwide during my professional years, I listened to and bought recordings of many different styles. I have around 1,400 CDs in my collection; half classical, the rest a mix of jazz, world, ambient, percussion, trance, hip-hop, popular and other forms of progressive and modern music.

One other point. I have always been a chronic whistler while listening to music. I always whistled unless in a closed public environment such as an aircraft cabin or a concert hall. I derived enormous pleasure from my personal accompaniment to the music. These days, I no longer whistle, even when by myself.   I no longer remember tunes other than simple Happy Birthday tunes, and just about all music now sounds grossly distorted. Hence my research into the cause of the distortion and the experiment described below.

The Experiment

On 13 November 2012, I visited Marina Salorio-Corbetto, a PhD student in the Auditory Perception Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University. The purpose of my visit was to see if she could identify the root cause of my musical distortion problem, and our studies are ongoing. At the lab, I was introduced to Professor Brian Moore. Brian is the Leader of the Auditory Perception Group and during our brief discussion, he asked me to describe how music sounds to me – ‘What do you hear?’ he asked. This is a tough question and my reply at the time was flippant – ‘a cacophony’ – and devoid of any meaningful content.   Subsequently, I pondered how to answer this question more accurately, and yesterday, I experimented. I selected around twenty CDs and played snippets on my Bose Lifestyle 20 music system. I kept my hearing aids in place (Phonak Nathos MW behind-the-ear aids) rather than listen to the music either with my hearing aids removed (I would not be able to hear much unless the volume was at full blast) or through headphones (which would again mean removing my hearing aids). Here are the results of yesterday’s experiment.

Results: Classical Music

First, I tried a couple of Beethoven Symphonies: the 5th (the Allegro, first movement) and the 9th (the Presto ‘Ode to Joy’, last movement).   The opening bars of Beethoven’s 5th are unmistakable but although I heard the four-note opening motif, da-da-da-dah, the fourth dah note did not seem to drop by two diatonic intervals. The drawn-out fourth note differed from the first three notes but not by the difference I remembered. (I’ll say more about musical memory as I proceed.)

Similarly, Ode to Joy is well known and, in my musical appreciation heyday, was a movement I could whistle at several levels – the voice levels and a couple of orchestral levels. Not anymore. I could barely make out the main tune even though I tried hard to impress my memory’s version over the notes I was hearing. Were it not for the general theme of the music coupled with the CD cover in my hand, I would not have known that this was Ode to Joy.

Next, I tried lighter classical music, selecting Vivaldi’s mandolin concertos – another favourite whistle-along piece of music. Alas, virtually nothing. I could barely make out the sound of the mandolin, let alone the tune. Something was there but tinny and without the rich harmonics I expected from the mandolin. A similar thing happened when I tried classical guitar music composed by Fernando Sor and Robert de Visée.  Nothing. Nothing recognisable as a tune; just a noise that, again, if I hadn’t known it was a guitar, I would not have been able to identify the instrument.

Before I moved to other musical genres, I tried some of Telemann’s trumpet concertos (the trumpet has a distinctive sound and is usually easily identified), another symphony (Dvořák’s From the New World), some Spanish Renaissance music (lute, vihuelas, guitar and female voice), and something more savage: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, an all-time favourite of mine – I have three different recordings of this piece of music all of which defied my attempts to whistle!   In all cases, I would not have recognised the music in a ‘blind’ hearing. I tried hard to recreate the music in my head from memory but it was challenging to match memory with what was being received and processed by whatever part of the brain does this. Notes did not go up and down as they should and, in many cases, the bass lines dominated anything happening at higher frequencies. I expect this given the nature of my hearing loss but I had hoped that my new Nathos aids with SoundRecover (non-linear frequency compression) might have helped in some of the upper frequencies. They didn’t.

Then, I turned to other styles of music.

Results: Non-Classical Music

Drums and drum music have long been a passion of mine and I dredged up several CDs containing predominantly drum music, starting with a two-girl two-boy Dutch percussion group called Slagerij van Kampen performing on an album called Tan. This group base their drumming style on the native drummers of Burundi but they add sampling and midi techniques to create more of a modern sound.   The beats are infectious and if you enjoy stage shows such as Stomp, you will enjoy Slagerij van Kampen’s Tan album. Here, I had more success. I could make out the beat and also the transition and juxtaposition of the drums. At specific points in this CD, the girls shout exuberantly and I could even hear this sound way above the drums – not as female shouts as such but certainly as a noise over and above the drums.

Moving on from this, I tried other drum music. I have a recording of a Japanese group called Ondekoza. This group specialises in drum music centred on the huge odaiko type of drum (2.25m in diameter, 2,000kg in weight). The low bass frequencies of this massive drum came through loud and clear on my Bose woofer speaker and I was expecting a knock on the wall from my neighbour (but, fortunately, he was either out or couldn’t hear it or liked what he heard!). Ondekoza uses a variety of smaller, higher-pitched drums in their performances. Although I could hear their noise, like tightly-stretched snare drums, above the odaiko, the bass frequencies dominated. But drum music is always acceptable no matter what higher frequencies are missing because the music is basically a rhythm.

I tried other drum music – A Mission into Drums, a compilation of different trance-ambient artists who focus their music around a repetitive drum beat. (A bit like drum ‘n bass without too much of the bass.)  I also tried an early 1986 electronic-style recording called Transfer Station Blue by Michael Shrieve who used an electronic drum to create a sharp rhythmic beat, rich in pulse-punctuated full-frontal higher frequencies.   Mission into Drums and Transfer Station Blue were not so successful for me compared with the ‘pure’ drum music of Slagerij van Kampen or Ondekoza because they both contain higher-frequency counterpoints to the bass rhythm.   My memory told me the counterpoints should be there but I didn’t hear them.

From here I moved on to more lush electronic music – albums such as Suave by B-Tribe (flamenco music mixed with trip-hop and ambient, with what some people describe as having ‘rich musical pastures and sweeping harmonics’); Suzuki by Tosca (Dorfmeister and Huber, two early exponents of what we nowadays call ambient music); Big Calm by Morcheeba; and Moodfood by Moodswings.  Each of these compositions is rich in aural landscapes, sweeping in their musical development, and fantastic late-night music to relax by (in contrast to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring). And, all was lost on me. I have listened to these CDs many times, enjoyed them, and knew their nuances but now they mean nothing to me. The Moodfood CD has Chrissie Hynde (of The Pretenders) as the vocalist on a couple of tracks but I did not hear her voice. Her voice is pure, like Maddy Prior (Steeleye Span) and Joan Baez, and unmistakable. But I didn’t hear Chrissie Hynde on the Bose tweeter speakers.

By now, I was quite depressed but I thought I would try just two more of my favourite ambient music CDs. The first was Sanchez and Mouquet’s Deep Forest, an assembly of electronic music based on the rhythms of the African natives in Cameroun, Burundi, Senegal and the sounds of pygmy tribes. The pygmy voices soar above the rhythms in repetitive chants and contribute to the unique sound of this album. There is only one adjective to describe this music, and that is beautiful.   But I could not hear these voices or make out the smash hit Lullaby tune on the CD.

The other ambient CD I tried was Gevecht met de Engle (Battle with the Angel) by another Dutch group, Flairck.  This is fast-paced music, frenetic in places, played by an instrumental group whose style has been described as a cross between ‘folk, jazz, classical and with a touch of blues.’    The music is not easy listening but in places it has several counterpoints running simultaneously and very fast and the challenge to me in my whistling days was to select one of the themes and stay with it for the duration of the track. If you do this enough times, you learn all the idiosyncrasies of the music. I was unable to distinguish any of the major themes. They all ran into one another and the result for me was indecipherable as music.

I tried one of my jazz CDs, an album called Blue Camel by the Lebanese oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil.   Abou-Khalil specialises in fusing Arabic oud melodies with jazz, rock and classical playing styles and some of his compositions are amazing: rich overtones, syncopation and an overall sound unlike any other jazz I’ve ever listened to. But again, it was all lost on me. I could not distinguish the various rhythms and the Arabic sound flavour was missing.

At this point I stopped, depressed with the results and challenged by how to describe them.

Conclusion

When I met Brian Moore, he asked me to describe the nature of the distortion I was claiming to experience when, these days, I try to listen to music. My answer was short, imprecise and subjective. I used to be pitch-perfect and able to whistle complex tunes correctly in pitch and timing. Many people can testify to this, especially my daughter, who is musical and has sung with the New London Singers and now sings regularly with a choir in Switzerland. Nowadays, I cannot whistle in tune, nor can I recreate the melody from memories. I have had all sorts of tests, including an MRI scan, to see if I have a brain tumour affecting either the auditory nerve or that part of the brain that processes and recreates sound received by impulses transmitted along the auditory nerve. Nothing was found. I have been tested twice for dead cochlea zones using the Threshold-Equalising Noise, TEN, test and, on both occasions, pronounced free of such zones. I sometimes wonder if it’s all in the mind – that is, my inability to hear music correctly is caused more by a psychological than a physiological problem. I am not aware that I have any psychological problems (but then, how can you tell?) but, as far as I know, I do not exhibit any behaviours that would point in this direction. I cannot see why I would subconsciously switch off a primary source of pleasure that has been with me all my life. It makes no sense to do this but I sometimes wonder as I move from one set of tests to another with no result, ‘Could it all be in the mind?’  The fact that I can no longer remember the tunes worries me.

I have tried to be objective in answering the question, ‘What do you hear?’  By its very nature, the answer is difficult to express in unambiguous, accurate scientific terms. We hear what we hear and if it’s pleasurable, fine. If it’s not pleasurable, it’s also fine: we just don’t like it. If it’s not pleasurable, whereas once it was, it’s not fine.   I would like to know why listening to music is no longer enjoyable and why I can no longer recall complex tunes in my head. Even if I can’t fix the problem, it would be good to know its root cause.

Footnote: Portsmouth Sinfonia

In my initial answer to Brian Moore, I also said that music, to me, these days sounds just as if the defunct Portsmouth Sinfonia had played it.   This orchestra, founded in 1970, was comprised of people who were either non-musicians or, if they were musicians, were asked to play an instrument with which they were unfamiliar. They were also asked to do their best rather than deliberately play out of tune.   Their first album, Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics (1974), became a surprise hit and the musicians continued playing until they disbanded in 1979.   You can sample the sound of this orchestra on YouTube.   Enter ‘Portsmouth Sinfonia’ into Google and see where it takes you.

If you do this, the renditions you will hear are extremely close to what I now hear when I play correctly played classical and non-classical music. But there’s an interesting paradox here. When I listen to the Portsmouth Sinfonia on YouTube, am I hearing what they played or a distorted version of what they played?   A distorted version of the music that is already distorted?   I will never know the answer to this question. Still, I have to admit, I collapsed with laughter today when I listened to Also Sprach Zarathustra, Richard Strauss’s stirring music used to herald the start of Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. The Portsmouth Sinfonia’s version of this piece of music encapsulates what I meant when I described my listening experience as a cacophony.

Postscript

I travelled to Cambridge three times in 2012/2013 and my hearing was thoroughly checked out by Marina Salario-Corbetto, a PhD student in Professor Brian Moore’s department. We planned a fourth and final trip to discuss her final assessment but ill health prevented Marina from keeping the appointment. Subsequently, she must have completed her PhD and I lost contact with her. All I have regarding her conclusions is a short email she sent me on 31 May 2013. Here is what she said:

Dear Ben,

I do apologise for not getting in touch. Things have been complicated here and I had some health issues too. I agreed to give you a quick response now; as I said in the lab, the tests I performed show that your hearing loss affected your ability to use temporal fine structure information. There is evidence supporting the role of temporal fine structure information in pitch perception. Therefore, the inability to use it can affect both speech and music perception. Your hearing loss has also affected your frequency selectivity, that is the ability to hear out different frequency components presented together. Your auditory filters are wider than normal. This again affects both speech and music perception. Both deficits are common when you have a cochlear hearing loss. I did not find dead regions in the cochlear. I could tell you more about this and give you a report that we could discuss …

Best wishes, Marina.

So, there you have it. My hearing loss has affected my ability to use temporal fine structure information which, in turn, affects my ability to process both speech and music. My auditory filters are abnormal also. I am still working at understanding the physiological behaviour that underpins temporal fine structures and auditory filters, but this is taking me deep into the realms of how the ear works and how the brain processes aural data and is currently beyond me. I accept that my ability to hear and enjoy music correctly will never return; there is no cure for what ails me, more’s the pity.

(^_^)