Tag Archives: music

It must be amazing to listen to music in the shower

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Posted by maxporter on November 10, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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Recently, I’ve been doing two things to relax: listening to music on my roommate’s CD player and taking long candle-lit showers. It just occurred to me during a typical mid-evening philosophizing session that it must be really fucking incredible to combine the two: listen to music while taking candle-lit showers.

I already have songs in mind – I’d play Only You by Portishead, then Karmacoma by Massive Attack, then… You get the idea. Sometimes I do daydream about taking Hearing-person style showers.

Ah, I said Hearing-person style – what do I mean?

Well, let me explain. I was born deaf. Also, for as long as I can remember, I’ve loved water – I gravitate towards swimming pools, streams, lakes, hot springs, and anywhere else I can submerge myself in water. I believe that I would have loved water regardless of my hearing status, but one special thing about these environments that I value is that I have no obligation to connect myself with the Hearing world.

When I was a very small child, this was a more prominent feature of my life than it is now: I almost never had an obligation to connect with the Hearing world – I was too Deaf to connect, and I didn’t particularly care. I lived a happy existence of endless snowball fights, imaginary rescue missions on the hill, pranks with my younger sister, and club-house building.

Then, when I got older, I got a cochlear implant and, with the first signs of puberty, I was expected to transition to adolescence. These things combined meant that I had to connect with Hearing people, even when I didn’t particularly want to – I could no longer just take off my cochlear implant, close my eyes against the interpreter, and ignore the annoying math teacher who wanted me to learn about variables. I, like the Hearing people around me, had to pretend to listen in order to fit into polite society.

I now understand the importance of this facade, but I did definitely feel a sense of resentment back then – plus, the constant bombardment of auditory input was not always pleasant. When I was in high school, I’d often take off my cochlear implant at home after a long day of school – after the echoy hallways, the buzzing fluorescent lights, and the shouts of teachers, I was completely fed up with the sense of hearing and longed for the peace of my deafness. My parents weren’t happy, but my attitude was: they can use visual communication, so screw them if they want to talk to me all the time.

Being in water was fabulous during this time because nobody expected me to understand them at all times – I can’t wear my cochlear implant in pools and such, so it freed me from the constraints of the day. I could put aside social responsibilities and focus on myself for just a brief period of time.

Even today, when I do socialize in or around water, it is with people who are thoughtful enough to ensure easy communication. They use visual communication and extra patience, which is a quality that I really appreciate in a friend and return whenever possible. Plus, I feel that water is a good way to explain deafness to Hearing people – from what Hearing people have told me, they can hear very little while underwater. Everything is muffled and far-away. So I just tell them to imagine walking around with that type of hearing all day if you’re hard-of-hearing – but I personally can’t even hear that much; I’m deafer than that. (“Deaf as a post,” I often joke.) I find that this helps Hearing people to understand my perspective a little better.

So, it’s really interesting that I’ve now reached a point where I fantasize about taking Hearing-style showers – in the past, I would never have imagined disturbing the peace of hot water running over my face. Music had no place in this world of silence and warmth.

I think this is a sign of my greater assimilation into the Hearing world. I definitely still see myself as separate from that world, but I feel like I’ve mastered a lot more of the foreign rules and norms that I didn’t necessarily understand in a previous time. I’ve ended up adopting some Hearing traits, like understated facial expressions and the ability to chat in a dark bar (sometimes).

I still feel secure in my Deaf identity, though. I feel like I am still fundamentally different from Hearing people – after all, when they fall asleep, they cannot turn off their hearing like I do when I take off my cochlear implant at nighttime. I still value the best of the Deaf experience – like the connection to a visual language and a community full of intelligent and creative people. And, most importantly, the Hearing world is still utterly foreign to me in a lot of ways.

So what if I daydream about listening to music in the shower? I still wouldn’t trade my deafness for hearing any day of the week. Even if listening to music in the shower would be kind of nice, it must be painful to be hearing 24/7. I’ll take my deafness and figure out a creative solution,1 thank you very much.

But, hey, if you can take a relaxing music-filled shower – put on Sly by Massive Attack for me, won’t you?

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  1. Like taking a bath instead and keeping my head above water to listen to music [↩]
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Natural sounds?

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Posted by maxporter on October 3, 2011 – 9:00 AM
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Remember this post in which I explored the fact that most of my favorite genres are electronic or distorted? Well, that post was inspired by a journal entry that I wrote in March of this year. I’ve found myself in the middle of a paradigm shift: lately, I’ve found myself bored with electronic or otherwise artificial-sounding music.

This is a really weird shift for me because most of my favorite music ever since I started listening to music on my own two years ago has historically fit in this category. If you asked me to name my favorite songs off the top of my head, I’d say that roughly 95% of them are electronic or otherwise made to sound artificial.

When I thought about it, I was tempted to give credit to my boredom with this type of music and the fact that I haven’t smoked in a while.1 But then I thought about it a little more, and neither of those factors should be enough on their own – I usually get bored with individual artists, not entire genres of music, and my previous tolerance-breaks haven’t affected my music taste this much.

No, the main factor is probably the fact that I have a new external processor: a few weeks ago, I received a Nucleus N5. I’m not going to lie – it is incredibly cool with a lot of amazing features, like a remote control. A fucking remote control – how cool is that? Goddamn, I love being able to click on my remote and turn up the volume or change the program without fiddling with the actual equipment on my ear. Another feature that I really appreciate is the fact that it automatically turns off if you take it off of your head for more than a few minutes – after waking up to several dead batteries in my old processor due to a pre-bed brain fart, I can tell you that this feature is the most amazing thing ever.

As shiny as it is, the main difference that I have noticed goes deeper than that: things sound more ‘natural.’ I have no idea what the engineers did – did they improve the code or the physical engineering or what? – but whatever it was, it’s an amazing feat. When I listen to music, I can now tell the difference between a series of electronically-generated sounds (eg, Graphics by Memory Tapes) and a series of sounds that were created with a physical instrument. Before, I couldn’t really tell the difference – because of the way that my cochlear implant processed information, everything sounded like a series of electronic sounds.

It’s weird because, if I think about it logically, I am still hearing a series of electronic sounds. I am not hearing sounds with the same timbre as a Hearing person does – if I had to make an educated guess about what my hearing would sound like to a Hearing person, I would guess that it still sounds flat and artificial. But, comparatively speaking, it’s less artificial-sounding than before. I suppose the engineers figured out how to add nuances to my hearing experience so as to more closely approximate the Hearing experience of the world.

I am sure that a hearing person would still think that it sounds artificial, but, for me, the technology has approached a point where it doesn’t matter anymore – it sounds so natural. It reminds me of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick – because everybody owns a robotic sheep that so closely mimics a real sheep, it becomes impossible to distinguish machine from flesh. In the end, it doesn’t even matter which sheep is the artificial one because they are both sheep.

It’s interesting. If I think about it even more isn’t it true that all hearing is an electronic signal? After all, the main function of the cochlea is to translate the eardrum’s vibrations into electronic impulses that the brain can understand, right? I wonder if, in the future, engineers could create a processor that translates data into electronic impulses so sophisticated that the brain of a person with a cochlear implant is no different than the brain of a hearing person? I think that that would be the point where the electric sheep and the real sheep would truly become indistinguishable.

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  1. Smoking is really important to my listening experience – read this for more on the topic. [↩]
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On Genres

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Posted by maxporter on September 16, 2011 – 2:46 AM
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After the “Cochlear Implants & Music” conference that I described in my previous post, I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about my relationship to music.

One of the things that I puzzled out whilst writing in my journal afterwards was the reason behind my attraction to some of my favorite genres of music. Namely, I gravitate towards electronica and punk music; I enjoy a wide diversity of styles within each of these genres.

If you look at it song-by-song, my musical taste1 can be seemingly random: I do shit like put Bad Religion in the same playlist as Florence + The Machine, Boards of Canada, and Ayreon. But, if you look at my musical taste from a broader genre-based perspective, commonalities emerge.

One of the primary commonalities between my favorite genres is the fact that they are already distorted and/or artificial-sounding. My hearing is unnatural and distorted; so is this music. Because a lot of my favorite genres of music are supposed to sound unnatural, it doesn’t matter if I am hearing it ‘wrong.’ Furthermore, the artificial soundscape of, say, a really trippy piece of electronica, doesn’t sound as artificial to me as I imagine it would to a Hearing person. Whereas the Hearing person is used to this rich, warm soundscape with millions of nuances, I am used to that sparse soundscape.2 For me, an artificial soundscape is normal.

Don’t get me wrong – I am capable of telling the difference between natural sounds and artificial sounds if I concentrate. (Acoustic vs digital songs, a human voice vs a computer voice, etc) It’s just that they sound so similar to me, so I often can’t distinguish them. To me, comparing natural sounds to artificial sounds is a lot like comparing turquoise to teal. I imagine that, for hearing people, it’s a lot more like the difference between red and green.

So, when I listen to a song that is already distorted and/or artificial-sounding, like Risingson (Otherside Remix) by Massive Attack, it is a lot easier for me to embrace my inner distortion. Weirdly, knowing that Hearing people also hear a distorted song gives me more confidence that I have the ability to evaluate the merits of a song myself.3

Like I said, the conference was really interesting and I still have yet to process many aspects of it. I only hope that I made sense in this post; I would be genuinely interested in learning more about how Hearing people perceive music. Most of what I know about Hearing people comes from conjecture based upon my observation of them, so please feel free to set me straight if needed.

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  1. Note: links to my last.fm [↩]
  2. For a point of reference: Hearing people have thousands of hair cells; I have twenty-four cochlear implant electrodes. [↩]
  3. I’ve had self-confidence issues prevent me from fully enjoying music in the past – navigate to this blog post from July 2010 and ctrl-F ‘unconsciously.’ Read that paragraph for more on this topic. [↩]
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“Embrace your inner distortion”

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Posted by maxporter on September 14, 2011 – 3:10 AM
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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.

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Reggae music in the backcountry

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Posted by maxporter on July 12, 2011 – 3:11 PM
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When I was fifteen years old, I went on a week-long backpacking trip with a Deaf camp. It was the first time I’d ever done such a long camping trip. I was completely deaf the whole time: I had left my cochlear implant at home because I didn’t need it and because I didn’t want it to get damaged or lost.

It was a fairly grueling route, even for our experienced backpacking guides who frequently tackled challenging hikes and worked out at gyms. I don’t remember the exact details anymore, but we climbed up so far that we reached snow – in July – and went through two or three mountain passes. There was a fair amount of steep terrain, and we would hike for at least six hours per day. So, as you can imagine, we were extremely tired by the end of the trip.

On the second-to-final day, we looked at the map and at our proposed itinerary. It was all gentle downhill or flat terrain, and we were supposed to split up the final six miles of the trip over the course of two days. Despite our exhaustion, we decided that we could tackle the entire thing in one day.

Summoning up our willpower and stamina, we did it! – we reached the campground before anybody else. I can’t describe how amazing that feeling was; the high of knowing that we had finished the trip at a better-than-average pace.

We set up camp at a car-camping campground, which was the epitome of luxury after roughing it for nearly a week – we were able to pitch a tent on a flat surface clear of sharp rocks! – we got into the camp van. Our guides, being experienced hikers, knew that we were in a prime location to find natural hot springs and that few things feel better than a soak in hot springs after a long trip like this.

One guide turned around and said, “We’re not really supposed to do this. So, don’t tell the camp director about this. She’s a boring woman anyway.” We all laughed and agreed.

Then she turned around and began driving the camp van as if it were an off-road SUV vehicle, bouncing in and out of ditches. Soon, she turned on the music player and it began blasting reggae music.

The music was so loud that I could feel the vibrations all the way in the backseat of the camp van. Exhausted after days of walking up and down mountains with 40lb on my back, I sunk into the carseat and let the music wash over me.

We did find hot springs off the side of the road in a random ditch and shared them with a random Indian family. Then we went back to the campground and slept deeply.

That day, especially the time in the camp van during which reggae music soothed my sore muscles, remains one of the most cherished memories of my life.

***

The reason I’m sharing this is because I was thinking about how some people tie memories of events with music. Specifically, I was thinking about this post I wrote a while back about the association I made between David Bowie’s song Space Oddity and my father.

It then occurred to me that I have earlier memories of music than that. And, interestingly, I was completely deaf when the event happened.

I have to admit, the presence of reggae music definitely improved that already wonderful day.

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Music: Still Deaf?

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Posted by maxporter on March 4, 2011 – 12:44 PM
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Recently, I’ve really gotten into music with an intensity that surprises even me. I mean, just the other week, I found myself listening to music for, like, five hours in a row or so. I used to be unable to distinguish between genres, but now if I hear an unfamiliar song by a familiar artist, I can identify it.

As a result, I sometimes ask myself: Am I still Deaf? Basically, it’s an existential crisis type of thing.

I mean, in a lot of ways, I am hard-pressed to think of an activity that belongs more to the Hearing world than music does. Just think of the definition: You use your hearing to listen to an arrangement of notes. I don’t think it helps that, in general, I feel pretty isolated from the Deaf community.

So, what has been helping me is thinking of times when I have enjoyed music while immersed in a Deaf community.

Vector graphic of silhouetted party-goers against a blue background.

One year, at Deaf camp, we were all hanging out in a yurt in our downtime. Some of us were chatting, some of us were horsing around. Basically, we were being kids.

Then this one girl pulled out her portable music player and strode over to the center of the yurt. The conversations around the room slowed and everyone stared at her. She put on this really loud song that you could feel and began rocking out to it. People goggled, astonished, but nobody said anything.

Then someone else ran to the floor and began dancing too. Then another person. Then another. Pretty soon, it was a party of Deaf people just dancing to music.

I watched the whole thing with a huge smile on my face, then one of the girls dragged me out of my chair and onto the dance floor. Now, I don’t dance, but I did that day. And, you know what? It was a blast.

-~-~-~

In the end, the truth is that music helps me emotionally. And I enjoy it. So what if I don’t fit in someone else’s preconceived notion of “what Deaf people like to do”? That’s OK with me.

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Ground Control to Major Tom

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Posted by maxporter on February 21, 2011 – 12:02 AM
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Back when I was asking hearing people a million questions in an attempt to try to understand why they like music so much, one of the reasons they gave was that they associated music with places or events. Like “our song” – some couples have a song that reminds them of the time they fell in love.

Well, at the time, I didn’t really understand it. To me, it seemed odd to remember where you had heard a song because, based upon my experience with consuming other media, it seemed like such an irrelevant thing.

For example, when I think of the first time I read one of my favorite books, Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin, yes, I can remember the first time I read it. I had just finished an AP exam early, which was held in our high school library, and I was bored. They wouldn’t let us out until the exam was formally over, so I grabbed the nearest book. Who cares? When I describe the book to friends, I don’t talk about that; instead, this is what comes out: “It’s a really cool story about a power-hungry psychiatrist in, like, Seattle, in a dystopian future, who tries to change the world when he discovers that his patient’s dreams change reality, oh, and btw, you really should read it right now.”

So, I reasoned, wouldn’t music be the same way? You remember the content, not where you first heard it.

At this point, though, I have to say that the idea that people associate songs with events makes more sense to me now because of one of those small, inconsequential events that ends up becoming meaningful later on occurred last fall.

Album cover of Space Oddity by David Bowie.
When my parents lived in the South, the plant that they worked at was an hour’s drive away from my parents’ home. It is in one of those rural towns where the population of the local Wal-Mart is larger than the surrounding county.

One day, my father drove me down to the plant to show it to me. During the drive, my father played some music. I don’t remember what I did – I probably stared at the pines zipping by outside because, to my eyes, the tall skinny pines of the South are exotic and beautiful plants.

After several moments of no conversation, I noticed that I liked what my dad was listening to better than what my mom usually plays – she has played the Greatest Hits by Queen so many times that I’m surprised she hasn’t burned a hole in the CD at this point. Queen is nice, but, seriously, after hearing it for the millionth time, it gets old. So I asked him what he was listening to.

He explained that it was Space Oddity, then began translating the lyrics for me. “Ground Control to Major Tom…” He waggled his fingers to indicate that there was an instrumental solo, then put his hands back on the steering wheel. “Take your protein pills and put your helmet on…”

As he was interpreting, I realized that he knew the song so well that he could have sung along. You see, most times, when people interpret, there is a lag. Their brain needs time to process what was being said and then re-assemble the spoken data into visual output. My dad didn’t lag for this song; he was right on the cue for the lyrics. So, obviously, he probably liked this song a lot.

It’s interesting – my dad is so into astronautics that he will actually flip to the NASA broadcasting channel and watch the boring-ass parts of space missions, like Day 16 of Obscure Vessel’s 100-day mission. If he passes a space museum, he is physically incapable of resisting its lure and inevitably finds himself in the building. He still tells me about when he and his college buddies built a homemade radio for the sole purpose of listening to the broadcast of the first man on the moon. I mean, in high school, he was in a rocket club.

This is the same man who likes a David Bowie song about a suicidal astronaut. So it makes me wonder. What does the song mean to him? Did the song get my dad through some tough times in his life? Who knows? I should ask him at some point.

What I do know is that the song was a kind of a father/son bonding moment. In my life, that’s a really special thing that’s only begun to happen very recently. Every time my father and I have a father/son bonding moment, I cherish it a lot because it wasn’t that long ago that I came out to my parents and they nearly disowned me. Also, there’s the fact that it was a David Bowie song – Bowie is super queer, right? I mean, he wears makeup. Yet my dad likes this song. Therefore, the fact that my dad likes Bowie makes me feel even safer around my dad.

That’s why, when I re-discovered Space Oddity last week and found out that, yes, I still do like it, even when I’m in my apartment in this world of concrete and cold stares instead of in a car zipping by loblolly pines, I immediately thought of my father.

So, yes, now I understand what hearing people were talking about when they said that songs evoke memories for them. I think that part of it comes from being an older person and having more years of experience to relive; part of it comes from listening to music for years and years – but that’s just my theory. Whatever it is, I know that the instrumental solos in the first verse of Space Oddity will always make me think of my father waggling his fingers in time to the music.

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