Introduction

In Part 1, I reproduced the complete version of an article I wrote in November 2012 detailing my search and experiments aimed at discovering why music had become distorted as deafness had encroached into my life. Following my attendance at a Hearing Aids for Music conference at Leeds University in 2017, I was invited to place a summary of my article on one of their websites. About a year later, I started receiving emails from people who said they had experienced the same problem and asking if I had determined the cause of the problem. My answer has always been no but the variety of the comments I received has indicated that I am not alone and that, apparently, the cause is still unknown.

In this second part article, I reproduce the emails I’ve received in chronological order. In several cases, I have had long exchanges with the authors, some of which are still ongoing. In the interests of brevity, I have not included my replies nor, in most cases, further comments unless they throw more light on the nature of the problem and suggestions for dealing with it.

22/08/2019, David wrote to the Leeds University contact:

Like Ben Bennetts I greatly enjoyed listening to music (mainly classical) until I developed severe high frequency hearing loss. Now almost everything sounds like traffic. Orchestral and choral works are the worst.

Lately I’ve experimented with Youtube to try to find pieces I can still recognize and follow. There are very few. The one piece I find I repeatedly listen to is Ravel’s Bolero, especially the performance by the Orquesta Joven de la Sinfonia de Galicia. This features a simple tune, virtually repeated as solos for different wind instruments, most of which I can hear pretty well. (Good camera work showing the young good-looking Spanish musicians probably helps to explain why this has attracted more than 18 million viewings—not all by me.) I can also hear bugle calls (surprisingly), and music for percussion instruments (e.g. Steve Reich’s Drumming and Music for Mallet Instruments), the slow movement from Schubert’s Trio Opus 100 and the aria from Villa Lobos’s Bachianas Brasilieras sung by e.g. Victoria de los Angeles. But not much else!

I began going deaf in my mid/late 50s and am now 86 and using Phonak Nathos S+ UP W hearing aids prescribed and supplied by [a local] NHS Trust.

Please let me know if other people with high frequency hearing loss have told you of music they can still enjoy. I could try adding it to my limited repertoire!

David

I have since had much discussion with David, mostly about music that still sounds recognisable and I did listen to the performance of Ravel’s Bolero he recommended. You can read what happened here:  https://ben-bennetts.com/2019/09/10/an-emotional-moment/

26/12/2019, Stan wrote:

Ben,

I’ve been doing a very limited amount of research on what sort of hearing aids are best for listening to music.  I saw your article about hearing loss and music and while I didn’t understand exactly what they meant by your inability to properly use temporal fine structure affecting your pitch perception it was an interesting article.

In my research I also saw a post by someone that said that a number of members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra who suffer from hearing loss use the Simplicity Hi Fi EP Hearing Aid.  Apparently that hearing aid uses an analog amplifier instead of a digital amplifier and is supposed to do a better job of amplifying music.  It uses an amplifier called a K-amp.

This is not my area of expertise but I’ve been using digitally amplified ReSound hearing aids that were quite expensive and I haven’t been impressed by their reproduction of music.  I’m thinking about ordering some of the Simplicity hearing aids just to try them out.

Have you tried analog hearing aids?  If not they might be worth a try.  I’ve been surprised by what I consider to be the very limited frequency range of amplification of my current digital hearing aids.  Mine apparently cap out at 16khz.  If audiophiles listen to HD music that uses frequency ranges up to 192Khz you have to wonder what affect having a higher range on the hearing aid might achieve.  It is my humble opinion that even if we can’t hear those frequencies they affect the ones we do here.  Therein lies the advantage of an analog amp that theoretically amplifies all frequencies.

I noticed that your article came out about a year and a half ago.  Have you come up with anything that works since then?

Stan

I did respond to Stan’s analog hearing aids question. Here is what I said:

Since buying the Resounds, I’ve been through several different brands of hearing aids but they’ve all been digital.  These days, my Oticon Spirit Synergy aids are supplied by the UK’s National Health Service and are free.  The aids you mention – Simplicity Hi Fi EP Hearing Aid – are not available here in the UK but are in the USA (which is where I think you are based) for around $500 from Walmart.  If I could borrow a pair and have them set up properly, I would give them a shot but, quite frankly, I don’t think my distortion problem can be solved by hearing aids.  When I watch a movie on my iPad Mini, I use regular Sennheiser earbuds i.e. I don’t listen to the audio through my aids. Even with English-speaking actors with good diction, I only pick up on around 50 to 70% of the dialogue (hence the use of subtitles) and the background atmospheric music is always distorted.  Recently, I evaluated the latest Phonak Audeo Marvels.  These aids are Bluetooth enabled and I was curious about how they performed.  My review has just been published in Action on Hearing Loss‘s (AHL) Winter 2019 magazine.  AHL is a UK charity and I’ve published several articles in the magazine; two on sound absorption in the home, one on subtitling, and now the Audeo Marvels’ review.  I’m attaching a JPEG scan of the review for your information.  The bottom line is that the speech audio was improved over the Bluetooth link but, for me at least, there was no improvement in my ability to hear music in its pure form i.e., undistorted.]

Stan replied:

Ben,

The hearing aids that I’m trying right now are also digital hearing aids.  They don’t have any of the K-amp hearing aids at my audiologist.  I’ll probably end up trying the K-amp hearing aids just to see what they are like.  In the meantime I’m trying the Philips HearLink 9010.  It has 10khz of headroom and you can definitely tell a difference in the way music sounds with these hearing aids.  They do seem to do a better job of amplifying sounds in general as well.

I’m using Amazon Music to listen to music with them and I’m listening to HD Audio.  When my iPhone is talking to the Philips hearing aid it says that the sound resolution is 24bit/16Khz.  I know that the hearing aids aren’t able to reproduce the sounds over 10Khz but they support an input signal with 16Khz according to my calculations that would be a bitrate of 768 kbps.  My other hearing aids (Resound Calais) only support “Standard” which is a bit rate up to 320 kbps. The audible difference is easily distinguishable.  If you can test the Philipps 9010s over there it might be worth a try for you.

I just did a little research on the hearing aids you are using and they are limited to 100Hz to 7200 Hz in the ear simulator measurement or 100Hz to 6200Hz in the coupler measurement.  The newer Spirit Sense that the NHS is currently prescribing is 100Hz to 8500Hz and 100Hz to 7500Hz respectively.  You can see where they both top out long before the 10KHz that I’m currently testing.

I’m not done doing research yet.  I analyze and find solutions for complex systems for a living in my day job.  This is the first time I’ve attempted to apply my skills to my hearing aids and I have a pretty large learning curve but I’m confident that hearing aids that actually supported 16Khz would sound noticeably better than anything I have tried thus far.  I’ve read some synopses of tests that were done with hearing aids that did support that resolution and everyone that tested them said they were better.  I’m going to keep looking and see if I can find some I can try and/or buy.  I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

Perhaps we’ll come up with a way you can enjoy music again someday.  😊

Stan

24/07/2020, Nancy wrote:

I just read ‘how does music sound to me’ and it’s exactly what I experience.  I also was very involved with music my whole life starting with piano lessons at age 6 and then learning violin, guitar, recorder, flute and several other instruments.  I played for dances and enjoyed listening to all kinds of music (just about anything except country/western and opera).  I also sang in choruses and small groups.  My hearing deteriorated in my late 50’s and I got hearing aids, but even then I could still play and enjoy music for a few more years, but then there was a dramatic shift and music started sounding like cacophony (the word I always used to describe it).  I worked with several audiologists and hearing specialists and also had an MRI – no apparent reason was found. 

I remembered a great aunt who had a severe hearing loss (before hearing aids were as technologically advanced and my aunt also who I understand stopped listening to music.  I wondered if there could be some genetic connection.  Since both are long gone I have no way to find out.

Your article was the first I’d seen describing exactly what I’m experiencing.  My audiologists said they hadn’t come across this before.  I can’t play anything because it sounds wrong.  I can’t sing because I have no idea what note I’m singing.  I can sing songs in my head, but I’ll never hear the again, and some I’m beginning to forget.  I’ve read Oliver Sacks book “Musicophelia” that describes something like this along with other things relating to music, but of course nothing fixes it. 

Is there anything else you’ve discovered, or anything that helps fill the hole?  Since most of my social life was around music and dance it became nearly non-existent though I’ve been trying to find other things.

Just knowing I’m not completely alone in this helps me because I sometimes think people believe I’m imagining it or making it up.

Thank you –

Nancy

And a few hours later after I replied suggesting she look at two of my posts: A Musical Interlude and An Emotional Moment, Nancy wrote:

Thanks so much for this reply.  I looked at the 2 links you sent, and have had a couple of somewhat similar things.  I’ve always had vivid dreams and since this hearing loss I have a couple of times dreamed that I’m hearing music.  In the past (when I could still hear) I dreamed a couple of new things, which unfortunately I couldn’t write down soon enough, but dreaming about music is not a surprise.  Your dream sounds amazing and much more vivid than my recent ones, but I still treasure any moment that music enters my life.

I plan to listen to the rendition of Bolero that you mentioned (that’s always been a favorite). I did discover that I can listen to things that are mostly percussion – like a marimba ensemble.  Still, listening usually makes me cry because it’s such a reminder of the things I can’t hear any more.   I also distributed most of my collection, but kept CDs by musician friends (have or had quite a few).  I also kept some favorite vinyl LPs just because it’s so hard to part with them.

Oliver Sacks wrote about a musician who seemed to have the same kind of loss, but he was able to retune his ear.  I tried, but either didn’t have the discipline or have a more extreme problem.  Though I did find I could ‘make’ myself hear different notes with a lot of work.  My other way of describing what’s going on is some tones are sharp, some are flat and some are missing.  I lose some people’s voices because they are in a range I just can’t hear.  My hearing loss also seems to be in the moderate to severe range and hasn’t changed much for about 10 years.

I do ‘sing’ in my head and I sound great to myself but if I open my mouth and sing out loud it just sounds like a monotone to me.  I never had it checked but I’m pretty sure I’m quite tone deaf too.  I remember an early piano teacher who told me almost no one was tone deaf  – they just needed to practice, but I don’t think that includes what we’re experiencing now.

Interesting that you’ve only heard from one other person.  Of course they can be those who just haven’t found your site, of those who haven’t written, but still, seems like this must be pretty rare. 

One other thing this keeps reminding me of – how we sometimes lose something that is central to our lives (another thing I hadn’t said is that I was a counselor and led groups both for therapy and in communities – obviously I lost my career as well).  Years ago I worked in a library and a man came in for a library card – back when you had to sign.  His hand shook very badly – he looked at me and said he had been a sign painter.  I know there are lots of examples (Beethoven being obvious) but that somehow always stuck with me.

Sorry to go on so long, but as you probably know, not many people really understands.  I have great empathy for you, and I felt that you did for me.   Thank you.   I hope we can stay in touch.

Nancy

29/01/2021, Sandro wrote:

Hi,

I was so in shock reading your article.

I have a similar experience but far from a hearing loss like you have.

When I started singing in headphones and mixer and microphone I think I got hearing loss in a manner that I feel things are different, I hear everything but something has changed.

I lost my sensitivity.

In this life, hearing loss if forever

Thats so sad.

I think we abuse of our Human body.

We get it because of abuse.

Thanks

Sandro

20/02/2021, Michael wrote:

Hello Ben  —  My name is Michael, and I am a 73-yr-old retired high school English teacher, living on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. I found your experiences very similar to my own, unfortunately. I always imagined I’d go blind, as my grandfather before me, not deaf. . . . I once owned over 1000 LPs, half of them classical. Later I switched to cds. Then, as my hearing loss became profound, I gave up listening, no longer even bothering with Youtube. . . . Lately, I’ve tried listening again, with extremely high quality earbuds on my Sony Walkman, as I go to sleep. I have this one wonderful cd set of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces (Finlandia recording from 1996), which seems to be about the only thing I can hear reasonably well enough to be more pleasurable than frustrating. So I thought, ah-hah!, solo piano, but alas, so far most others still sound as through a fog. . . . I recently bought little speakers for the Walkman and thought maybe the combination of them with my hearing aids would be a solution. However, the sound was worse than with my expensive earbuds. . . . So like yourself I’ve had NOT to face the music! I do love the Grieg and still fall asleep to it. I’ll try again occasionally, but I don’t to waste my money. Brendel’s recording of Beethoven’s Bagatelles is good enough to allow me to enjoy Fur Elise. Horowitz’s Chopin, not very good. I’ll still try some Shostakovitch Fugues and Preludes, maybe some Rachmaninoff; Katchen’s Brahms didn’t work out. . . . I’m a Tibetan Buddhist, and funnily enough, a cd of mantras and two singing bowls cds come through pretty well. . . . So there’s my story. I appreciated reading yours, so I thought I’d write this to you.  —  Be healthy and happy. Kind regards   —  michael

02/09/2022, Andrea wrote:

Hello Ben!

I am writing from Nova Scotia!  I was just reading your very informative research on hearing loss and the distortion of music. My father, who is 94, has always been a musician… the guitar, the organ, the bass, the coronet, the piano; also quite the singer. He no longer can listen or play music because it is so distorted – he cringed today while he was visiting my sister, playing her piano and he tried to go an octave up and couldn’t stand it!!  I am trying to find out more information or give him some music that he might be able to listen to without this problem.  Do you have any tips???

Thank you!

Andrea

02/03/2023, Marietta wrote:

Hello —

              I just came across your 2018 article about your experience of musical distortion. I’m a longtime amateur singer and sometime minimal pianist, also a listener to music, and since developing some pretty significant hearing loss, I’ve been having exactly what you describe. I’ve stopped singing in the chorus I was with for years. I wonder if you’ve made any progress in discovering solutions? Oddly, although I don’t always hear the tone I should, I can still sing in tune — or so my musical husband and some others say. A chord on the piano will start out sounding sour, then gradually improve. So weird! 

Hoping you’ve made some progress. 

Best — Marietta

On 31/07/2023, Ian wrote:

Hi Ben, it was interesting to read your article. I have had more or less the same problem for a few years. You are the only other person I’ve come across with this issue. I am not a professional musician but I play (ed) acoustic guitar. Now I simply can’t process music, it’s all just noise. I can’t discriminate melodies even when I can imagine the notes in my head, and when I play guitar, it sounds woefully out of tune. I do have many of the symptoms of APD which may be in part or whole responsible, I don’t know. But in addition to not being able to process music, I have a problem with processing normal speech, particularly if there is even a low level of background noise or in echoey environments. But there is one other issue, all voices sound distorted, with like a buzz or sibilance. I was just wondering if you had this issue also? Again, I have not come across anyone who has this problem and audiologists just look blank when I describe it.

Cheers

Ian

Part of my reply:

One comment you made interested me – your reference to APD. That was a new initialism to me – Auditory Processing Disorder. I’d not heard of APD and I looked up the symptoms on the UK’s NHS website:

If you or your child have APD, you may find it difficult to understand:

• people speaking in noisy places
• people with strong accents or fast talkers
• similar sounding words
• spoken instructions

APD is not a hearing problem. People with the condition usually have normal hearing.

I have the first three of these symptoms in addition to the musical distortion you have read about. I had assumed my problems were simply due to my moderate-to-severe impairment and was intrigued by the end statement that People with the condition usually have normal hearing.

Having said this, I had considered that my distortion problem could have been caused by some abnormality with my auditory nerve but could never find anyone knowledgeable enough to check it out.

08/09/2023, Harold wrote:

Hi

I just found your email in researching musical distortion. I am trying to fully recover my hearing of music six weeks after returning from Bangkok to Rio de Janeiro (a 20 hour stretch). Am an oboist and composer and gradually normal musical hearing seems to be returning with the help of medicine and acupuncture.

My neurologist claims all will return to normal, but when? My oboe playing alone is almost normal although I was hearing A as A# until recently.

Any help is welcome.

Yours

Harold

I replied asking about the medicine. Subsequently, Harold wrote:

Sorry to hear of your permanent condition after six troubling weeks mine is improvise first i had wax taken out of my ears, second was hisbila/ bilastina for my nose, Betaserc has helped equilibrium in my ears (hope you find a translation on Google translator)

Finally my homeopathic doctor gave me Merezeum 12CH/Straphysagria 120ch/ Phosphorus 120 ch/Causticum 12CH

I am convinced there is a cure with is [for this?] torture.

PS one session of acupuncture open my ears and nose and inner ear

Best wishes Harold

I checked out the treatments Harold mentioned:

Hisbila (bilastine) is intended for the treatment of the symptoms of allergic rhinoconjunctivitis, such as sneezing, blocked nose (nasal congestion), itchy and discharged nose, red and watery eyes, and for the treatment of the symptoms of chronic urticaria, such as skin rashes with reddish plaques (erythemas) and papules, accompanied by itching.

Betahistine, sold under the brand name Serc among others, is an anti-vertigo medication. It is commonly prescribed for balance disorders or to alleviate vertigo symptoms. It was first registered in Europe in 1970 for the treatment of Ménière’s disease but current evidence does not support its efficacy in treating it.

Merezeum 12C/Staphysagria 120CH/ Phosphorus 120CH/Causticum 12CH: these are all homoeopathic remedies for a variety of conditions including skin problems, mucous membranes, nerves, surgical wounds, anxiety, sore throat, bronchitis, pain relief,…

I have to admit these are not treatments I would try.

16/09/2023, June wrote:

Hello Ben,

I was just reading your article on how you could no longer enjoy music.

It’s from 2018 I think so you may not be interested in hearing from fellow sufferers.

I am in Toronto, but oddly I grew up in Leeds.

June

And subsequently:

Hi Ben,

I am so impressed that you would spend so much time on this. One thing I am curious about is why only a few of us deaf people seem to be affected by the inability to hear music. I had a friend who had hearing loss before me but could still listen to music.  

One of my grandsons was playing some Pete Tong [an English DJ] in his car one day, and I have been listening to his stuff in the car. Only the ones recorded during lockdown work for me. 

June

23/09/2023, Steven wrote:

Dear Ben,

I am Steven from Germany. Purely by luck I came across a blog post of yours (“How does music sound to me?”) on the internet (actually from 2012), published on the website Hearing Aids for Music on 2nd March 2018 by Alinka Greasley. I really enjoyed reading the essay, and most importantly, the experiences described are almost 100% in line with my own, unfortunately somewhat frustrating experiences.

I too am an electronics engineer and someone who has suffered from increasing hearing loss for about 10 years (am now 62). I too am a great fan of classical as well as jazz music. For about four, five years I have not been able to use my CD collection, which is also extensive, because I experience the music in a similar way as described by you in the essay. I have also done the “hearing tests” myself with different music like you, with or without hearing aids. So far, no doctor or audiologist has really been able to help me in this matter either.

Even though I have really accepted my personal fate in this regard, I wanted to ask you if you could possibly get any new insights into this matter in the meantime, just out of interest as an engineer and scientist (I also hold a PhD degree). I would be very pleased about any feedback.

By the way, I find your own homepage ben-bennetts.com extremely interesting and informative, and I’m sure I’ll be visiting it regularly in the future.

Thanks a lot and best regards,

Steven from Kaiserslautern/Germany

Steven replied to my initial acknowledgement:

Dear Ben,

Thank you very much for your feedback and the information, even if the message is not “positive” in the sense of our distortion problem. Nevertheless, I find your answer interesting and am really grateful for it. And the collected texts(!), which I really enjoyed reading myself and also recommending to some friends (and my son!). I think that these precisely describing, at the same time very personal and humorous texts are extremely helpful in awakening an adequate understanding on this difficult subject. Your linguistic fine feelings for narratives combined with the precision of an electronics test engineer gives me personally a rare reading pleasure on a factual issue, really great!

I have indeed done some own research based on your writing and read some scientific publications on the subject of temporal fine structures. You wrote about the loss of the ability to resolve these temporal fine structures. From the articles I have read, I have understood that in our case the individual tones may still arrive at the auditory nerve in principle, but that their coding no longer functions correctly in the brain, especially with regard to the temporal fine structures. However, it is ultimately not clear why this happens to some hearing-impaired people (like us). Whether it is really due to damage to the auditory nerve, as you suspect, I don’t know. Because I can say quite certainty that I was not aware of such an “incident ” as well.

There is one thing that I did not find directly in your many texts, but which actually was for me the real reason for my search for a possible cause. It is that in audiological examinations according to the hearing threshold tests (i.e., perception of individual frequencies) I am “only” moderately hard of hearing, but at the same time suffer from a very strong discrimination disorder, i.e. I can process the combination of these sounds in the form of speech and music extremely badly. Even with “optimal” setting of the hearing aids at definitely sufficient volume, I can hardly achieve a speech intelligibility of 50% in quiet surroundings and less than 5% with background noise. Based on the hearing threshold audiograms, even the medical experts from various university clinics say that I should actually be able to understand much more speech and music than I do in reality. The reason seems to be this lost ability to resolve temporal fine structures. Even a cochlear implantation would not help here.

But in the end, I have accepted my fate that I will never be able to enjoy music again, and I am now closing my search in that subject. Your texts and books provide the best examples of how one can still deal with fate in a positive way and make life worth living!

I am still in the last years of my active professional life and therefore often have to deal with the experience of a hearing impaired person on a daily working basis. But there are now more technical aids that really help in many situations. For example, I use this Roger Select Bluetooth microphone from Phonak, which can enable my participation in a group conversation even with more than four people, as long as they don’t talk completely simultaneously and are not sitting e.g., in a restaurant. I don’t know if something like that would be of interest to you though.

Thanks again and, as mentioned last time, I’ll for sure be visiting your website/following you blogs regularly.

Steven

The discussion with Steven is on-going and we have speculated on various causes of musical distortion. Here’s an extract from an email I sent on 13/10/2023:

One more thing. Going back to our discussion about the cause of my hearing distortion, I have one wild conjecture. When I was a teenager, I attended a secondary school in Grantham from age 14 to age 18. For the last four of those five years, I was a boarder at the school. I have written about my experiences at a British boarding school. Here is a brief extract:

“Haggis”

The boarding school live-in House Matron was an unattractive and very dour Scottish lady known as “Haggis”.  She joined the school in 1940 and retired in 1960.  I never did find out her real name.  Her universal cures for all our ills were either to give us a shot of neat quinine (colds, ‘flu, coughs, …) or “put a plaster on it” (cuts, bruises, sports injuries, …).  That was it.   There was very little love, affection or sympathy but we survived!

In my later years, I suffered from moderate-to-severe hearing loss and from 2006 at age 65, I started wearing hearing aids, one in each ear, all day every day.  I researched the possible cause of my hard-of-hearing condition as I had not worked in a noisy environment, nor had I been exposed to continuous loud noises such as disco music, pneumatic drills, or rapid gunfire.  I discovered that one possibility could have been the amount of quinine I ingested while at school.  It is now known that quinine can induce deafness in later life (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinine, for example) and, as a result, the compound is now used sparingly to combat malaria and the dosage in tonic water is considerably reduced from that used in the colonial days when tonic water was seen to be an anti-malarial aid best flavoured with gin.

I forgot to tell you about this possibility. If you check the wiki article, you will find comments about quinine and hearing problems in the second paragraph under the main heading and again in the section sub-headed Adverse Effects. I spoke about this when I visited Marina at Cambridge University. She was not aware of the link between quinine and hearing impairment but her professor, Brian Moore, was. He said that as far as he was aware, the potential damage caused by neat quinine to the inner ear and, possibly, the auditory nerve, can take thirty to forty years to cause hearing problems but the research is very scarce as ingesting quinine in neat form is no longer recommended.

If you Google ‘Can quinine cause deafness?’, you will find other websites reporting the connection. Here’s one, for example https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/857679-images?form=fpf
There are others. I’ve not followed up on this possibility since 2019 (the year I wrote my school-days book). Maybe I should.

Ben

And in his reply, Steven speculated about Ménière’s disease:

It was also unknown to me that quinine can cause hearing problems. So it is interesting to know that, although I cannot remember of any use of quinine in my earlier life except a few drinks of gin tonic. What I understand from the explanation on the internet is that ototoxicity (such as quinine) is typically associated with bilateral high-frequency sensorineural hearing loss and tinnitus. In my case, noisy environment or loud noises could definitely not have been the causes of my hearing impairment. The cause for my hearing loss is, with very high probability, Ménière’s disease. At the beginning of my weakening hearing ability, I experienced two strong vertigo attacks within one year, and I have had all the years since then a kind of low-frequency tinnitus. My current hearing loss is also especially severe in the low frequency range. All these are typical symptoms of Ménière’s disease.

The cause of Ménière’s disease is still unclear even in the medical research. Some of my relatives have also had such vertigo attacks, but mostly without permanent hearing damage. So maybe it is a kind of genetic influence, I don’t know. However, as I told you before, my hearing loss in terms of selective frequency perception is “only” moderate, but the loss of discrimination ability is severe, making the understanding of speech, particularly in (even only slightly) noisy environment, extremely difficult as well as the recognition of tune. I’ve always been interested to find out if there is a way to train the brain to re-gain such discrimination ability as I can percept tone, but not tune. It seems, unfortunately, that there is no such possibility (maybe it is a topic in the medical research, but I cannot find any information on the internet).

The mechanism of hearing impairment is versatile and complex, probably much more complex than that of visual impairment, particularly the processing of sound. It is not just about to hear it or not. I’m a kind of semi-happy that I can use the technical possibilities available today to “manage” the most important things in my professional life. But the missing of social activity and music enjoyment is quite hard.

Steven

04/11/2023 04:40, Marcia wrote:

Hello Ben,

I’ve just read your description of your difficulty listening to music on the musicandhearingaids website. It’s strikingly similar to the problem I’ve developed in the past number of months, after several years of using hearing aids. There’s one major difference between what you described and what I experience: I can accurately hear tunes in my head, and can still sing in tune. But when I listen to live music in concerts, what I hear is cacophony. I’ve been an amateur singer for many years, but may soon need to leave my chorus, as I can no longer properly hear the singers singing other lines, which is important in ensemble singing.

So I have two questions. First, have you heard of others with this problem? I haven’t, and wonder how rare it is. Second, how are you doing now, and have you been able to find any way to remedy the problem?

Best,

Marcia

It was Marcia’s email that prompted me to write this 2-part blog. I replied:

The original version of my article was written in 2012, way before I started my blogging website. The 2018 Leeds University version you found is shorter than the original and I am now thinking of publishing the full version on my website and then following up with a summary of what the twelve people who have contacted me have said including their symptoms and speculations as to the cause. I have 114 followers (I’m not that famous!) but if I use the right tags, I might attract others with the same hearing distortion impairment.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. There are others who experience music distortion as deafness enters their lives. Nobody seems to have a definitive explanation but the loss of musical appreciation has a profound impact on quality of life. In my own case, the musical greats I used to listen to are now but a distant memory of pleasure no longer available to me. In a way, it is comforting to know that I am not alone in my loss but disquieting to learn that nobody seems to be researching the cause of the problem or, if they are, their results are not visible to those of us who suffer.

I’ll leave you with three quotations:

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
Oliver Sacks, best-selling author and professor of neurology at NYU School Of Medicine

“Music is life itself.”
Louis Armstrong, jazz trumpeter (1901-1971)

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.”
Bob Marley (1945-1981)

(^_^)