Music Mayhem

This past weekend I attended a concert my brother was playing in as a member of the Purdue Wind Ensemble. It was the third time I've been to one of these since transitioning to Cochlear Implants a little over a year ago. The tough part to accept is the drastic difference in my perception of music from before CIs. The interesting part is what the absence of definition is teaching me about music.

He's the good looking one in the back-left, rocking the penguin suit.

I took a liking to music at a very young age. Ask my mom. By the time I was three I was obsessed with the family record player. By age eight this developed into an obsession with beating on anything that made a cool sound. By age eleven (coincidentally the year I began losing my hearing) I played in my first concert at Decatur Middle School. The kind where you have about 50 drummers playing bell kits and practice pads. And by playing I mean butchering. And by butchering I mean, we were absolutely in time with each other; clean as could be.

Despite my hearing loss and the use of two hearing aids, I took this passion for music and ran with it. I taught myself to play guitar during high school, while still playing drums in the marching band and various ensembles. I played bass guitar in a rock band that had a good shot at making it big, but I had to go off to college and stuff. In college I played bass drum for four years in the Purdue All-American Marching Band and then culminated the apex of my musical career by traveling to New York City in 2006 to play with the Purdue Wind Ensemble in Carnegie Hall.

It was this show in Carnegie where I realized just how passionate and emotional music can be. Our director, Jay Gephart, pieced together a seven song show that I will always hold dear to my heart. By 2006 (still wearing hearing aids) I was starting to notice a decrease in sound in my right side but my left side was still pretty good. The acoustics in that venue are so magnificent that to this day I can still remember just how amazing even the applause sounded.

I want to share with you one of the songs we performed that day, Fantasia on "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair" by Mark Camphouse. Maybe you can see why this song in particular is permanently embedded in my appreciation of music. If you don't have time to listen to all 12 minutes, at least do yourself a favor and listen to 7:15 through the end.



So what's different now? Well as I sat there last Friday listening intently, I kept realizing I wasn't really listening intently, I kept losing my focus. The easiest way to describe it is that my perception of music and pitch has been compressed. And as I receive sounds much more monotone-ically than I did in the past, I'm beginning to realize that there's something truly engaging about music as a dynamic range. The sound has developed for me enough over the past year that the instruments sound pretty realistic and somewhat close to how I remember them. I can pick out most of the different parts if I concentrate. But the range of pitch is not all there, leaving my brain confused and my senses less stimulated.

It's honestly a pretty enlightening revelation about the correlation between music, senses and emotions. I WILL say things have already progressed beyond anything I could imagine in just over a year with CIs, having been mostly deaf going in. As for Fantasia, it's not all there for me as I remember it, but I have the added benefit of knowing what it DOES sound like and that helps my brain fill in the missing info. I still can't listen through that track without getting goosebumps (even if it is pitchy), which is not something I can say for many songs anymore.

The good news, as always, it only gets better. Stay tuned...(ba doom, ping).