Two really scary programmes this week, and not a vampire or psychopath to be heard. Both gave personal accounts of catastrophic hearing loss. Not something you’d expect to work on radio, the aural medium. How can you explain what it’s like to stop hearing when there’s no pictures, no other way to explain the absence of sound except through sound? But that’s what made them both such terrifying programmes. All the time I was listening, I kept on thinking: what would it be like if I suddenly couldn’t hear these voices, that piece of music they’re playing, this discussion of ideas.
Hearing loss doesn’t mean, of course, that you actually stop hearing. It’s far worse than that, as both programmes illustrated, to alarming effect. What hearing loss actually means is a loss of clarity, of diction, of meaning in sound, to be replaced by Babel-like distortions, buzzings, screechings. It’s not a silent world you discover — silence would be a relief — but a confusing, nightmarish existence, where nothing you hear makes sense and often all you can hear is a continual high-pitched whining, or a gravelly wheezing, like a radiator slowly being bled.
On this week’s Between the Ears (Radio 3, Saturday), Nick Ryan, an award-winning sound designer, told us how his experience of loss came on very suddenly. He was out one evening with friends when he began to feel slightly disconnected, separated from everyone around him. ‘My head feels as though it’s liquid,’ is how he now describes the sensation, ‘as if I’m wearing a glass bubble full of fluid.’
Other symptoms then began to emerge: he couldn’t turn round while walking otherwise he fell down because his hearing loss had affected his balance. He couldn’t concentrate because he became so depressed, unwilling to go out and meet people, to leave the house. He couldn’t decipher what people were saying, and he also couldn’t decipher what he wanted to say either — as if his hearing loss had affected the way his brain actually functioned.
This was all told in first-person monologue, as if we were experiencing the same sensations, at the same time. The soundtrack beneath and behind his voice (created by Ryan himself and Lisa Gee) relived Ryan’s audio disconnect, giving us a meaningless barrage of noise, with all the normal sounds of life jumbled up, a kettle boiling, a buzzer going off, as if in a computer program that’s got scrambled.
In just half an hour we were taken right inside his experience; what it feels like to lose not hearing but how we make sense of what we hear. Ryan’s programme, entitled Disequilibrium, also made us realise how dependent we are on our senses. It’s not that they help us navigate our way through life, through sound, taste, touch, etc. But that without them we almost lose our identity, our connection with the world around us, our sense of who we are. This was not at all comforting.
Michael Berkeley, the composer and Radio 3 presenter, also withheld nothing in his account of what it was like for him to lose his hearing, without any warning, after suffering from a common cold. In It’s My Story on Radio 4 (Tuesday), he began by explaining that as the son of the composer Lennox Berkeley and the godson of Benjamin Britten, from as far back as he can remember his whole life has revolved around music, either playing it himself, writing it for others to perform, or talking about it on radio. Music has been his passion and his profession, but now at a rehearsal for a new work specially written for the Proms he can no longer tell whether the orchestra has interpreted his score as he wrote it. What he hears is too distorted. When he plays the piano, he no longer knows whether he is playing the right notes.
For months he didn’t dare talk about what was happening to him, hearing was too central to his life. Now, though, he wants to warn others that if he had been treated in time, with steroids, the damage to his inner ear might have been less (the consultant he spoke to suggested that if you’ve suffered sudden hearing loss and it’s not better within a week you should see an ENT specialist straightway).
Berkeley is still trying to get over the shock of his loss, his bereavement from sound. Yet listening to him talking to John Major about the latter’s choices of music for Private Passions you’d never have guessed he couldn’t hear properly the works under discussion, nor until recently could even bear to listen to music. He sounded just as enthusiastic and insightful as he has done since he launched the programme in 1995.
Major was invited on to the programme not as the former PM but as the author of a book celebrating his father’s life as a music-hall performer. Musical theatre is what inspired him to launch the National Lottery, he now says, before giving us the overture to Die Fledermaus. ‘Not a very original choice,’ he admits. But it’s ‘such a joyous piece’.
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