The Obligatory Introductory Post
TL;DR - I love and write about music. I have a cochlear that I call my "robot ear". I wasn't always like this. Phish saved my life. Expect more on the Anthology of American Folk Music.
Hello and welcome! My name is Rodney Hargis, and this post is my long-winded way of explaining who I am and the topics I plan to discuss here.
The Before Times
Ever since I can remember, music has played a tremendous role in my life. I have always geeked out over music and gotten extremely excited over the details to which many people react with a resounding “So?”
I grew up in rural North Carolina and was raised on gospel, country, and bluegrass music. I was 10 years old when MTV came on the air in the summer of ‘81, but stopped watching MTV or listening to popular radio when I discovered the Dead Kennedys at age 14.
From there, I began my education in punk rock and anything outside of the mainstream. I wanted to see how loud and weird things could get, and bands like the Dead Kennedys, Butthole Surfers, and Black Flag were right up my alley, and they led me to deeper into music that veered even further from the mainstream with acts like Ministry, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, and Negativland. I also studied up on my history, devouring the catalogs of the Velvet Underground and the Sex Pistols, and through the poetry of Lou Reed’s lyrics, I found myself drawn towards other singer/songwriter types, like Elvis Costello, and Bob Dylan.
Once I found Dylan, the Grateful Dead followed shortly afterwards, and I once I’d worked through their discographies, I decided to explore the music that influenced them. It was during the height of this particular musical obsession that Smithsonian Folkways reissued Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music on CD.
To my ears, the Anthology was the Rosetta Stone. It opened up worlds to me. Not only did I have the sources from which Dylan and others were drawing, I heard music unlike ANYTHING I had EVER heard before. While I’d dabbled in the blues, and spent quality time with The Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson in my teens, the Anthology launched my exploration into the “old timey” music in earnest.
In the late 90’s, I moved to New Jersey and began singing and composing my own material, although it would be another decade before began performing publicly. My musical self-education deepened, and my experience with the music of the Grateful Dead led me to the “jam band” scene, and to an array of other musical styles like reggae, jazz, funk, soul, and electronica, which I’d never explored before.
As my interest in songwriting grew, I immersed myself in the catalogs of the great songwriters like Townes Van Zandt, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Tom Petty, Gordon Lightfoot, Jim Croce and others. Eventually, I composed enough of my own songs and developed enough skill as a performer that in 2007 I started performing publicly with my wife, and in 2009, we took the name 3twenty6, which we’ve used ever since.
The After Times
In October 2014, I was sitting around the house once evening, watching a baseball game when I suddenly lost hearing in my right ear. My head felt full, as if something had just exploded in the right side of my head, and I couldn’t hear anything. I figured it was temporary and that I’d regain hearing within a day or so. That never happened.
I soon learned that I had experienced sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSHL), which means that audio received from my right ear was no longer being transmitted to my brain. I had no prior health issues, and in a nanosecond I went from hearing in perfect stereo sound to hearing in mono with ungodly tinnitus in the deaf ear (and a fair amount in the functioning ear) along with vertigo that ultimately lasted for 2 years. (The vertigo returned after I contracted COVID in 2023 and has yet to recede. )
Six months after the hearing loss, I got a cochlear implant which I frequently, lovingly, and jokingly refer to as my robot ear. Robot ear is my own terminology and should not be confused with medical lingo.
The robot ear is actually two things. There’s the cochlear implant (CI), the hardware that is surgically installed inside my head, then there’s the processor which I wear on the outside of my head. The processor is a small, battery-powered, puck-like object, slightly larger than a thimble, that affixes to the side of my head via magnet. The processor receives audio from the outside world, converts it into a digital signal, passes it through the magnet into the implant, and into my brain. At concerts or online meeting settings, I wear a headband to secure the processor in place (because it’s not the kind of thing you want to lose).
The robot ear was installed to combat the tinnitus in my deaf ear and allow me to perceive audio on my deaf side. The “sound” that the cochlear implant beams into my brain is dramatically different from natural hearing and often, it doesn’t sound like sound at all, but it feels like sound. It’s difficult to explain, and as I continue to write about my experiences, I hope to one day discover the perfect words with which to describe the way sound coming from the robot ear feels in my brain. For now, just know that it’s quite different, and the scene below from the film “The Sound of Metal” does a pretty good job demonstrating what it’s like to hear through a cochlear implant.
Music in the Robot Ear
So, a little technical stuff is in order before I get into the experience of music in the robot ear, but it all boils down to one simple fact. With natural hearing, there are tens of thousands of tiny hairs in the inner ear called cilia. These cilia transmit sound from the ear to the brain. For a cochlear implant to function, the cilia are removed from the inner ear and a small wire with twenty three nodes is installed in their place. These twenty three nodes do the job that was performed by tens of thousands of cilia. Technology has its limits, and these twenty three nodes only transmit a certain portion of the sonic palette, and the difference is quite profound.
It bears mentioning that the cochlear implant is designed to process and deliver speech into the brain, so that people with hearing loss can have help understanding what is being said. Music goes far beyond the typical human vocal range, and can be interpreted rather strangely by the robot ear.
Because such an incredible amount of my attention in life had been focused on music in some way or another, my hearing loss dramatically impacted my ability to enjoy music, and thus, my ability to enjoy life. After my hearing loss, I was miserable. I knew that music would never sound the same again, but I was hoping that the robot ear would change that. But when I got the robot ear, I was horrified to learn that a lot of the music I loved sounded absolutely awful.
My Life Was Saved By Rock ‘n Roll
My implant was activated in March of 2015, and for five nights in late June and early July of that year, the surviving members of the Grateful Dead reunited for a series of concerts to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s formation. Jerry Garcia died in 1995, and Trey Anastasio of the band Phish was tapped to fill his role and play lead guitar for the shows.
Now, ever since Lou Reed and Bob Dylan introduced me to what potent songwriting was about, I have gravitated towards the “deeper” and “more poetic” lyricists and wasn’t terribly interested in bands that didn’t have what I considered to be “good” lyrics. This lyrical snobbery also meant that I wasn’t a fan of Phish.
In spite of my misgivings, I decided to watch the shows anyway. Since my life had been so difficult, I thought I would at least try to enjoy the music. Besides, it was possible that these may be the final concerts that these former members of the Grateful Dead played together.
As I watched each concert, I slowly warmed to Trey Anastasio in the space once occupied by Jerry Garcia, and I found, to my amazement, that his guitar actually sounded good in my robot ear.
On July 3, 2015, the second set started with the classic Grateful Dead pairing of Scarlet Begonias and Fire on the Mountain, and it was during this moment that any remaining hint of dislike for Trey Anastasio that remained in my body was melted away. It wasn’t even the performance that did it for me. It was the joy on Trey’s face. As I watched him, I realized that these songs (which are as dear to me as sacred texts) meant just as much to Trey Anastasio as they meant to me. But beyond that, in the sheer joy on his face, I recognized that my own life had been utterly devoid of joy for quite some time.
I stood up, I danced. I cried, and as I danced and cried, I realized something else.
It sounded ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE in the robot ear, and as it plays in the background while I type these words, it STILL sounds ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE in the robot ear.
Realizing that Trey’s guitar tones sounded so incredible in the robot ear, I decided to give Phish a shot.
It turns out that their catalog contains dozens of songs that are just exactly perfect for the robot ear, and at the moment, the robot ear’s favorite Phish song is a toss-up between “What’s the Use?” and “Slave to the Traffic Light”.
So far, I’ve seen them live 14 or 15 times, watched dozens of live concert streams, and listened to countless hours of their live performances, and it’s a safe bet to assume that I’ll talk more about Phish in future posts.
Finding Phish led me to seek out more “robot ear friendly” music, and I’ve found that string quartets can sound especially nice to the robot ear, as does a lot of ambient electronic music.
As I listened to ambient music with my cochlear implant, I also realized it was good for blocking out tinnitus in my functional ear. This was a great discovery because since my hearing loss, the tinnitus in my good ear has made falling asleep incredibly difficult at times.
I searched around for just the right ambient music when I decided to try and make my own and began creating and releasing ambient music under the name Lucent Haze in 2021. The music started as MIDI loops and keyboard improvisation but soon gave way to simply keyboard (and eventually guitar) improvisation based on a theme. As of this writing, I’ve released a dozen albums as Lucent Haze, and expect to keep churning out more whenever the mood strikes.
What’s Next?
This is the tip of the iceberg, and the start of an adventure for me. I’ve been working on a series of essays about the Anthology of American Folk Music, and the first of those will be coming soon.
If you’re interested in checking out my music, you can visit my YouTube Channel, the 3twenty6 YouTube Channel, visit 3twenty6.com for setlists, lyrics and other info, or check out Lucent Haze on the streaming service of your choosing.