Sounds in silence

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.