On Experiencing Music with a Cochlear Implant (Part One - The Long Hello)
TL;DR -- (1 of 2) My lifelong relationship with music, how this relationship was altered by sudden single-sided hearing loss in adulthood, and then getting a cochlear implant in my deaf ear.
I call this Substack Rodney writes about music, and so far, it has mostly contained writings about specific artists or pieces of music. In this article, I want to talk about the role of music in my life, discuss how my relationship with music was upended by hearing loss, and start discussing how my cochlear implant (aka “CI” or “robot ear”) has changed this relationship.
Before I begin, I should mention that this is an article I’ve been trying to write for years, but finding the correct words has been an incredibly difficult affair for a couple of reasons. First, the tale is incredibly personal, and sharing this story requires me to be more emotionally naked than I prefer. Second, the sound I receive from the cochlear implant is so different from what I hear my functioning ear, that the words to describe this combined experience can prove quite evasive.
NOTE: I told part of this story in The Obligatory Introductory Post which opened this Substack. Folks who’ve read that piece might encounter a bit of déjà vu. For this redundancy, I humbly apologize.
PART ONE: My best friend has always been music (or, the long setup)
I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember. I’m an only child, and many of my earliest memories are centered around music. My maternal grandmother died when I was 5 years old, and one my few fragmentary memories of her involves me standing on an ottoman performing “Hound Dog” for her, showing off my best Elvis moves for my blind grandmother.
I was raised in the 70’s and 80’s in a rural southern town about 30 miles away from a major(ish) city. During my youth, church was the hub of our lives. My father sang bass in gospel quartets, and I have vague early recollections of them performing in various churches. As we’d take long drives down country roads, I would watch the farmland pass to a soundtrack that included countless Southern Gospel performers, the O.G.’s of country music (Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, Jim Reeves, Roy Acuff, the Louvin Brothers, etc.), then-contemporary country performers (Red Sovine, Loretta Lynn, George and Tammy, Conway Twitty, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Waylon Jennings), and the occasional “oldies” (which is basically all pre-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll).
At 8 years old, or so, I got my first radio, and discovered the joy of scanning the AM and FM bands for music. My radio stayed on all night and I would try to fall asleep to it every night. (I say “try to fall asleep” because, like my love of music, insomnia has been a fixture in my life.) During these nights, I discovered the world of pop music, and what my generation would eventually refer to as “classic rock”.
In 1981, MTV debuted, and it kinda blew me away. For a little while, it was in charge of my musical tastes, and I still have a soft spot for some of those early MTV songs. (Videos like Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t It Be Good” (that suit!), Big Country’s “In a Big Country” (those ATVs! What fun!!), Men Without Hats’ “The Safety Dance” (All that frolicking!), Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town” (Oh, sweet melancholy!), and the first video played on MTV “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles still stand out in my head.
At thirteen, I got an after school job, and the music thing started to get serious. I had income and no financial responsibilities so I bought all the music I could afford. The only obstacle being that the nearest record store I knew of was located at the mall, which was an hour away from the small town where I lived.
When I was old enough to drive, and the pesky need for a ride to the mall was behind me, the music obsession grew with abandon. I soon learned that mall record stores sucked, and that independent record stores were this place to be. Once this information came into my brain, I dove into punk rock and the “alternative” music that emerged. While hair metal dominated the high school parking lot, bands like the Dead Kennedys, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, Black Flag, Sex Pistols, Dead Milkmen, and Violent Femmes were the rock gods of my teenage years.
While the aggression of punk was the perfect companion to my teenage rage and confusion, I also felt like I needed to find something else, something more, something… deeper. I started buying stuff that I’d heard of, but never actually heard. At 16, I grabbed copies of The Velvet Underground and Nico and Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. The Velvet Underground and Nico was purchased because a record with badass song titles like “Heroin” and “Black Angel’s Death Song” had to be great. Highway 61 Revisited, on the other hand, had “Like a Rolling Stone”, which was the only Bob Dylan song I'd ever heard, so I didn’t go into it entirely blind.
These two albums launched new music obsessions, and each of those obsessions has led me down countless musical rabbit holes, as I wanted to see what music inspired them. There are twists and turns along the way, but my life has been an ever evolving series of phases of fascination that has come to encompass a vast, and ever-growing musical universe.
In my twenties, I lived and worked in (or near) the city, and usually had at least a part-time job in a record store. For me, these jobs were educational opportunities. Going to work was like going to school except I was finally learning stuff I cared about. My hunger for music was insatiable. I would devour the catalogs of a given artist or group, then check out artists that influenced their work and devour their catalogs. I constantly explored musical rabbit holes and enjoyed every minute of it.
To my good fortune, the stores in which I worked sold used CD’s (affording me a chance to get lots of music on the cheap), AND, they catered to music enthusiasts, eagerly making special orders for hard-to-find releases, and keeping all sorts of music in stock that one wouldn’t easily find in many places.
In those years, as my tastes were stretching to encompass an ever-expanding array of music, I met people whose passion for music matched or exceeded my own, and asked them about the music they loved. These kind folks introduced me to artists and recordings that I’ve treasured ever since. I found out what classical music was, and discovered my love of Beethoven (no irony or foreshadowing there, huh?). I got turned on to the glory of soul music, and the blessed voices of Marvin, Aretha, Otis, and the Godfather of Soul. I got hipped to Sweetheart of the Rodeo and Gram Parsons’ notion of "Cosmic American Music” (the precursor of what folks call “Americana” now). As I sought out those who influence the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan, I found myself learning about jazz before becoming immersed in the world of pre-depression recordings, where I eventually encountered the Anthology of American Folk Music, (about which I enthusiastically write to this day). I got to know the blues of north Mississippi and artists like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, and I took wild genre-bursting excursions with the likes of Parliament/Funkadelic, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, before going over the edge with Negativland.
In the years that followed, my excursions continued. I dug deeper and deeper into the works of artists I loved and the music that inspired them. I traded bootleg recordings of live concerts and studio outtakes (on physical tapes and CDs through the mail, then via the Internet. When Spotify launched in the US, I purchased a subscription, and finally heard those records that I could never find, or hadn’t gotten around to sooner.
PART TWO: Sudden sensorineural hearing loss (or, going halfdeaf)
I was born with normal hearing in both ears, and despite the years I spent listening to music and attending concerts, I never experienced any issues with my hearing until one fateful evening in October 2014. On that particular night, things were about as ordinary as they could get. I was working towards a degree at the time, and spent the evening with some advanced mathematics homework while a baseball game played on TV in the background.
The math homework involved infinity, and discussed how there are different sizes of infinity. For instance, there are an infinite number of values between any two sequential integers. For example, between the numbers 0 and 1, there are an infinite number of digits that could be put behind the decimal. Simultaneously, the number of integers is also infinite. Both of these statements are expressions of infinity, but the infinite set that contains all whole numbers, also contains an infinite number of infinite sets of values between each whole number. (Meanwhile, I suppose yet another, even larger infinity could include the set of all positive and negative integers and the infinite sets of values that lie between them.)
While trying to wrap my (very finite) brain around these sizes of infinity, I felt incredible pressure in the right side of my head, and in that instant, the sounds of the baseball game that had been in my right ear were gone, and replaced with high-pitched ringing sounds. As troubling as this was, I felt confident that it was something simple and that my hearing would soon return, and despite the horrific racket in my newly-deafened ear (a racket I would soon learn is called tinnitus), I somehow managed to fall asleep that night.
The following morning, I woke up, and unfortunately, was still deaf in my right ear. As I did each day, I sat up on the bed, threw my legs over the side, and stood to go to the bathroom. As I stood, it felt as if the entire room was also in motion. I fell back onto the bed, well aware that a visit to the doctor was in order. I contacted my job to let them know I wouldn’t be in, and my wife took me to our primary care doctor.
From there, things get fuzzy in my head. My primary care doctor referred to an ENT. I received high doses of Prednisone, to no avail. The ENT sent me to other specialists, and I wound up seeing the team at UPenn hospital in Philadelphia, PA. They confirmed that hearing loss in my right ear was total and permanent, and the only silver lining to be found was that the severity of the tinnitus made me a candidate for a cochlear implant. The doctors filled out paperwork, and my insurance provider miraculously, surprisingly (and quite possibly accidentally) approved the procedure.
The Obligatory Sidebar
Before I discuss music in the cochlear implant, I feel that a sidebar on how the cochlear implant works might be in order. As I attempt this explanation, please bear in mind that I am not a medical professional and I’m not trying to provide a comprehensive explanation of anatomy and physiology here, but give the bare bones basics as I understand them. Here goes…
The inner ear is home to many tiny parts, one of which is the cochlea. In a normally functioning cochlea, tens of thousands of hairlike fibers called cilia transmit sound from the inner ear to the brain.
During cochlear implantation surgery, cilia are removed from the cochlea and a tiny cable with 23 nodes is inserted into the cochlea. These nodes are tuned to certain frequency ranges and perform the work once performed by the tens of thousands of cilia, sending their version of sound into the brain. The cochlear implant itself is attached to the skull just under the skin. A month or so after the surgery, when the implant site had sufficiently healed, a trip to the audiologist is needed to have the processor activated.
When the processor is attached, sound from the world enters the processor, passing through the magnet from the processor to the cochlear implant. From there, the signal is transmitted down the tiny cable into the inner ear, where it exits via the aforementioned twenty three nodes to enter the brain as something very much like sound. (I’ll try to explain later.)
End obligatory sidebar.
PART THREE - Activation and beyond (or, call me Cyborg)
In February 2015 (four months after going deaf in my right ear), I underwent cochlear implant surgery. I waited the required month and saw an audiologist to have the implant activated.
Immediately upon activation, sounds from the robot ear flooded my brain, but it was difficult to understand much of anything at first. Getting my brain to understand speech through the CI required daily training. Each day, I plugged up my functioning ear (to minimize distractions), then played an audiobook directly into my cochlear implant while reading along with the text of the book for at least one hour.
I started the journey with David Foster Wallace’s mammoth Infinite Jest. I chose the text specifically because it contained a lot of complex language, and I wanted my brain to get accustomed to processing a rapid fire succession multi-syllabic words through the robot ear. Plus, the book is really long, and though I had tried to read it previously, I could never get through it.
Fortunately, the training worked. Not only did I make it through Infinite Jest (a feat unto itself), my brain had adapted and I could understand speech through the robot ear. After Infinite Jest, I worked my way through Mary Karr’s memoirs, which helped train my ear to better understand female voices in the CI.
I continued this daily practice for about 18 months, alternating between male and female authors/readers, and it did wonders for my comprehension with the robot ear. Since then, I have been able to follow conversations (in quiet environments) pretty well with my hybrid stereo hearing. In recent years, I’ve experienced hearing loss in my functioning ear to the point where I am effectively deaf in even moderately noisy environments because brain can’t make sense of the audio input it’s receiving.
Music and the Robot Ear
While the cochlear implant enabled me to follow conversations with less difficulty, listening to music in the CI is a different story. The cochlear implant has a more limited sonic palette than natural hearing and is designed primarily to process speech. This design, and the sheer depth of my relationship with music made my initial attempts at listening to music through the CI soul crushing affairs.
It was suggested that I start by listening to recordings that I knew inside and out. There’s a lot of music under that particular umbrella, but I decided to start with my all time favorite singer, Bob Dylan. It was not a good choice.
In retrospect, I doubt I would have found any singer’s voice pleasing. During the first couple of months after activation, any song I listened to solely in the robot ear sounded awful. I would hear all sorts of sounds, very few of which were appealing, and even fewer bearing any resemblance to music as I thought I knew it.
To my dismay, songs that I’d known and loved for years were reduced to annoying racket. Individual notes lacked resonance. Vocals were high-pitched, and most vocalists sounded as if robotic versions of themselves had inhaled helium before singing. Sustained notes didn’t sustain. High notes were kinda painful, and low notes were basically MIA. Despite repeated attempts to enjoy music in the CI, things barely improved.
Fortunately, the robot ear can be tuned, so to speak, with the help of an audiologist. (The process is actually called remapping, although I prefer to call it tuning.) During remapping, the audiologist connects a machine to the robot ear (while the robot ear is attached to my head and active), then makes adjustments to the frequency mappings for those 23 little nodes the CI. In the first two years after activation, remappings were frequent, and the work and patience of these audiologists was (and continues to be) tremendously appreciated. Their adjustments and retunings did a lot to improve the quality of my experiences with music in my robot ear.
But no audiologist can make the experience of music in the cochlear implant identical to that of the natural ear, and for someone like me who is so deeply into music, learning to appreciate music through a cochlear implant was a process. Hybrid hearing has changed my relationship to music, and I have come to a place where I can appreciate what each ear brings to the experience.
PART FOUR - The Breakthrough (or, not THAT band!)
For the first few months after my cochlear implant was activated, listening to music streamed directly into the robot ear was a difficult, painful experience, and I backed off for a bit, figuring if I gave it a break then maybe I’d find something that didn’t sound like a robot massacre.
Instead, I started listening to music in the room to get a better feel for how the two inputs would function together. In retrospect, this seems like a more logical way to start, but since I’d had such success streaming audiobooks directly into the robot ear, I assumed I’d acclimate to music just as quickly.
The robot ear was distracting at first, and I kept its volume significantly lower so that I’d hear most of the music through the lone functioning ear Over time, with continued effort, I found a few things that weren’t too terrible, and one day, I was listening to music and noticed it sounded really good. It kinda surprised me, and I turned up the volume in the robot ear. It was really good, and the louder it got, the more I liked it.
The music was a recording of the Grateful Dead performing their classic pairing China Cat Sunflower → I Know You Rider on August 27, 1972 in Veneta, Oregon, which can be heard below. (For folks who are unfamiliar, “China Cat Sunflower” is a Grateful Dead original. “I Know You Rider” is a traditional number. The band doesn’t stop between songs, and the “→” between the two song titles signifies the presence of an instrumental jam that served as a bridge between these two songs.)
I’ve listened to this recording many times in my life, and by force of habit, I always turn up the volume when they launch into the jam, because it is pretty hot stuff. When I turned up the volume on this occasion, Jerry Garcia’s guitar tone hit my robot ear, and the cochlear implant sent a signal into my brain that was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
The music from the robot ear hit my brain with a jolt of breathtaking beauty that was like sound, but it was also not like sound, but rather like a peculiar and not at all unpleasant physical sensation. I turned up the volume on the robot ear, and it only got better, but when the jam ended, and the vocals returned, the robot ear’s volume had to go back down.
But this was a breakthrough for me and I was delighted to discover that if I turned it up during the jam, my robot ear just might get a treat. Needless to say, I started relistening to a lot of Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band shows.
For deadheads… I should really make a list of the spectacular stuff. The “Second that Emotion” from 4/29/71 and the “Black Peter” from 10/29/77 immediately spring to mind. And Cornell 77, but that goes without saying.
During this time, it had been announced that the surviving members of the Grateful Dead were reuniting for 5 concerts in the summer (two in Santa Ana, California, and three at Chicago’s Soldier Field, site of the Grateful Dead’s final concert on July 9, 1995). For these shows, Trey Anastasio (of the band Phish) would be playing lead guitar in Jerry Garcia’s spot.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, I loved the Grateful Dead, and thanks to the robot ear revelation, their music was in heavy rotation again. On the other hand, I actively loathed Phish. I tried to give their music shot back in the 90’s, and got a couple of tapes from from 1995 that came highly recommended. But it didn’t work for me. It seemed like impenetrable, goofy nonsense for some clique to which I didn’t belong.
But if I’m being completely honest, (which I finally am), the biggest reason I didn’t like Phish had nothing to do with the music, but with a couple of people that I really didn’t like who were into Phish. By my reasoning, if those people liked that band, then I couldn’t like them.
(Was I a petty snot or what? I let my opinion of someone else influence my opinion of a band?? What the hell is wrong with me? I’m being vulnerable here, going out on a limb with a sentiment to which no one can possibly relate, but it’s my truth. The whole point of this is to provide a thorough and honest telling of my experience with the cochlear implant and music, and if I am to provide such a telling, then I must reveal myself for the petty music snob I once was. Your forgiveness, I do beg, dear reader.)
So, with all this love for the Grateful Dead (and petty resentment for Trey Anastasio) in my heart, I leaned in to love and ordered the streams, figuring that, worst case scenario, I could use the shows as an opportunity to manufacture reasons to nurse my pointless grudge against Anastasio.
I can’t begin to describe how miserable I was at this point. Yes, the Grateful Dead sounded pretty good in the robot ear, but that was the only good thing I could say about my cochlear implant experience. I still struggled to hear with it. The robot ear was uncomfortable to wear and would be outright painful after a few hours. When I wasn’t wearing it, the tinnitus in my deaf ear was so loud and persistent that it was impossible to concentrate or relax.
Plus, the hearing loss left me with persistent vertigo that lasted over two years. I carried a walking stick wherever I went, and was always at risk of hitting the deck. I had been sober for a decade, yet I stumbled like a drunkard. I struggled to follow conversations with or without my robot ear, and life looked pretty bleak.
My wife and I were visiting my mother when the shows took place, and we watched all five streams in mom’s two-bedroom house. Mom was a great sport, and didn’t seem to mind this hippie band music in the least. But out of respect for mom, we also kept the volume to a reasonable level.
I can’t recall a specific moment where something really sounded spectacular in the robot ear, but nothing sounded bad, and overall, it even sounded… (dare I say it??) good?! Needless to say, this was an incredible improvement and a tremendous turning point in my journey. I found Trey’s guitar tone just as appealing to my robot ear as Jerry Garcia’s, and started admitting to myself that I really kinda liked his performances.
Then it happened. On July 3, 2015, this band that had Grateful Dead founders Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann, joined by Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Chimenti, and the guitarist from Phish (who was filling the shoes of Jerry Garcia) opened the second set with the legendary Dead pairing of “Scarlet Begonias → Fire on the Mountain”.
The preceding shows had chipped away at my resentment against Trey Anastasio because his skill as a musician was undeniable, but it was in this moment, at the beginning of the second set that it all clicked and the previously unfathomable happened… I got my head out of my own ass, and over my stupid damn self. The irony here is that it wasn’t even the music that did it for me. The moment of transformation came not from the music, but from the performer’s appearance.
As they started “Scarlet Begonias”, I saw, in the face of Trey Anastasio, something that I had been desperately (though unknowingly) craving. Because in this one instant, I saw past my own bullshit long enough to recognize that these songs were just as sacred to Trey Anastasio as they were to me, and to acknowledge that I was bearing witness to one of the purest expressions of joy that I’d seen in a very long time.
Here’s the moment when I finally got over my own stupidity. In the comments to that video, I penned a similar confession several years ago.
After getting over myself, I listened a little closer and realized that yeah, this sounded pretty good in the robot ear. We left my mom’s and on our ride back to New Jersey we listened to live Phish, and I haven’t stopped since. It’s not the only thing I listen to, but Trey rescued me from one of the deepest funks of my life and reminded me that joy is possible, so I’ll always be in their debt. Plus, as I’ll explain in PART TWO of this article, Phish sounds REALLY F***ING GOOD in the cochlear implant.
I feel like I’ve hit a good stopping point, so I’m gonna wrap things up here. In PART TWO, I’ll explain a little more about how music in the robot ear is sometimes “more like a feeling than a sound”, get into more detail about the Phish thing, and discuss how my hearing loss has impacted my own music. (Yeah, I’m a musician too. I don’t talk about it a lot on Substack just yet. I figure I should contribute something of real value to the community before trying to get ears on my tunes.
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