A few months ago, I went to a conference about music and cochlear implants. It is still something that I have not completely processed, so I have been putting off writing about it. But fuck that, I’m just gonna tell you guys about it now.
First of all, it was pretty difficult to get there. I had to take a Greyhound bus to the city where it was, and there was a car accident in front of us so we were super-fucking late. Then I had to figure out the small town’s crappy public transportation in order to get to the hotel where the conference was held, and it took me about 10 minutes to figure out where the stop was etc. I waited for the bus a little longer, and it finally came. But then the bus broke down, so we all had to wait for like half an hour for a back-up bus to come. Then it rained, and I didn’t have an umbrella. And I hadn’t had dinner, so I was hungry.
Needless to say, by the time I got there, I was late and grumpy. But then, before I went into the conference room, a deaf guy came over to me and began chatting. He was really nice and put me in a better mood. I told him I’d talk to him later and went into the room.
I hadn’t missed much. Most of it consisted of a bunch of researchers telling Hearing parents how their children would perceive music with cochlear implants. The researchers talked about the joy that cochlear implants would bring into the lives of deaf children, and everyone in the room seemed to take it for granted that everyone loves music. They talked about scheduling ‘listening drills’ for children to ‘learn how to appreciate music’ – which, if you ask me, sounds like a really good way to make kids even more bored with music.
It was all very strange.
Then I noticed these two Hearing parents in front of me. They had a newborn baby, and I watched them out of the corner of my eye. Every now and then, they would glance at their newborn deaf baby with worried expressions and whisper to each other. It was pretty obvious that they thought of her hearing as a ‘problem’ to ‘fix.’
Just as I had made up my mind to leave, the kind deaf man that I had spoken to earlier got onstage. What? Curious, I stayed.
Turns out he was the keynote speaker! His name was Richard Reed, and he was a musician who had gone deaf later in life. Because he was late-deafened and hadn’t learned how to navigate society as a deaf person, I felt some sympathy for him. It was, in other words, easier for me to relate to his desire to get a cochlear implant.
He mostly talked about how much joy his cochlear implant had brought to him, but one segment of the lecture in particular caught my attention: He explained how he “embraced his inner distortion”.
Basically, he had spent his entire life relating to music in one way. He grew accustomed to processing it in this specific manner. But then, when he got his cochlear implant, the sensory input that his brain received was quite different from what he had heard before. It was like seeing the world through a maze of funhouse mirrors. So he had to re-learn how to piece together auditory data into a coherent picture.
I could relate to this point – after my cochlear implant was turned on, my brain had to take this brand-new sensory data and rearrange it into a meaningful picture. As time went on, bits and snatches of sounds slowly became coherent words.
Another thing that Richard discovered was that he couldn’t relate to old familiar songs in the same way that he had in the past. They literally sounded different to him. What’s more, they sounded distorted. That’s where embracing his inner distortion comes in: he had to accept this new soundscape and then find enjoyment in it.
It was incredibly fascinating. In the end, despite everything, I didn’t regret going to the conference. Seeing Richard Reed was more than worth it. It was amazing to hear about somebody else’s experiences with his personal music-appreciation evolution.
