The sound of evening insects, the crunch of gravel underfoot, the sound of shopping cart wheels over little bumps, the high pitches, the clarity of consonants, it's all yours again, and you're reveling in it, wife, to our mutual delight.
Tuesday, you noticed some difference as you were fitted with the hearing aids, but nothing spectacular. Wednesday, nothing seemed to work at all, the ear fittings nor the microphones themselves, and we, I confess it, railed against the professionals and the prices. Tonight, after learning how even just a little wax can occlude the sound, you're in heaven listening to the sounds of everything in all their crispness.
Your simile was apt: without the aids, it was like seeing with a few sections of bandwidth missing from the light spectrum, and almost all of the darker blues, an experience less striking, more muted and flat.
I've been having hearing problems this last week, so that my voice seems murky and muffled to me, my left ear seem numb. There's a kind of low-grade roar when there isn't any other sound. Here's hoping it's just wax. As it is, I can't hear my students quite as well as I used to, and I'm not sure whether I'm speaking too loudly or softly.
Still, I can hear and enjoy bird song, and the sounds of water in streams, music and 'normal' volume speech. I expect restoration of my normal acuity of a few weeks ago, but how good was that really? Who knows? We may be a pair, you and I.
Is it too late to dip into R. Murray Schafer's classic on the 'soundscape': 'The Tuning of The World' with its notation system for the analyzing and appreciating the different sounds we experience in our vicinity? He wrote: 'Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore. Noise pollution today is being resisted by noise abatement. This is a negative approach. We must seek a way to make environmental acoustics a positive study program. What sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply?'
What indeed? You said that these devices, one in each ear, restore a sense of immediacy, of things happening now, of a milieu of quickly passing occurrences, of the busy-ness of the world. Sure there are voices, mellifluous and expressive I don't want to lose, and music, of course, from symphonies to sonatas, but it's sense of life going on behind and beside me as well as in front that I would hate most to lose...
And your experience suggests that I won't have to, which is great good news, as is the restored capability to whisper to each other.
Tuesday, you noticed some difference as you were fitted with the hearing aids, but nothing spectacular. Wednesday, nothing seemed to work at all, the ear fittings nor the microphones themselves, and we, I confess it, railed against the professionals and the prices. Tonight, after learning how even just a little wax can occlude the sound, you're in heaven listening to the sounds of everything in all their crispness.
Your simile was apt: without the aids, it was like seeing with a few sections of bandwidth missing from the light spectrum, and almost all of the darker blues, an experience less striking, more muted and flat.
I've been having hearing problems this last week, so that my voice seems murky and muffled to me, my left ear seem numb. There's a kind of low-grade roar when there isn't any other sound. Here's hoping it's just wax. As it is, I can't hear my students quite as well as I used to, and I'm not sure whether I'm speaking too loudly or softly.
Still, I can hear and enjoy bird song, and the sounds of water in streams, music and 'normal' volume speech. I expect restoration of my normal acuity of a few weeks ago, but how good was that really? Who knows? We may be a pair, you and I.
Is it too late to dip into R. Murray Schafer's classic on the 'soundscape': 'The Tuning of The World' with its notation system for the analyzing and appreciating the different sounds we experience in our vicinity? He wrote: 'Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore. Noise pollution today is being resisted by noise abatement. This is a negative approach. We must seek a way to make environmental acoustics a positive study program. What sounds do we want to preserve, encourage, multiply?'
What indeed? You said that these devices, one in each ear, restore a sense of immediacy, of things happening now, of a milieu of quickly passing occurrences, of the busy-ness of the world. Sure there are voices, mellifluous and expressive I don't want to lose, and music, of course, from symphonies to sonatas, but it's sense of life going on behind and beside me as well as in front that I would hate most to lose...
And your experience suggests that I won't have to, which is great good news, as is the restored capability to whisper to each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment