But music is far more acoustically complex than speech, and its message is abstract. “There’s a big difference between what music expects of hearing and what speech requires,” acoustic scientist Charles Limb of Johns Hopkins University explains to me. “Speech is redundant. It’s all within a certain frequency range.” So speech doesn’t require as much information to make sense of it. The words themselves are a handy clue, as is the context in which they are used. Musical sounds have a lot more going on within them, and if there are no lyrics to serve as guideposts, it gets even harder. Classical music is generally much harder to follow than pop, for instance.
In one of his papers, Limb compared “Happy Birthday to You” when spoken, sung, or played on the piano. Represented in waveform, the spoken words are distinct, narrow bands. When sung or played on the piano, those same bands begin to spread out and “smear” like a squirt of ketchup after it’s been mushed into a hot dog roll. For all of us, then, the sound waves of music are smeared already. A cochlear implant smears the sound further and the result can be a muddle.
There are a handful of people, however, who defy expectations. In Melbourne, Australia, there’s a young woman who lost her hearing suddenly around the age of thirty. Before that, she played the piano very regularly. Within eighteen months of going deaf, she got a cochlear implant and now has two. “She still continues to play the piano a few hours a day,” says Peter Blamey, who has been working with cochlear implant recipients since he joined Graeme Clark’s team in 1979. Now a deputy director at the Bionics Institute, a research organization founded (as the Bionic Ear Institute) by Clark, Blamey says of this woman, “She has pitch perception that’s as good as mine. She can do things like rating consonance and dissonance of chords and notes played in succession and do things that are generally not accepted as being possible with a cochlear implant.” Blamey and his colleagues are still studying her, but they are guessing that in her case training has been the important factor. “The difference seems to be that six hours a day that she spends playing the piano, and maybe the learning that took place before she went deaf. They’re both central things,” he says. “We’re looking for things that are going to be more generally applicable for improving music perception for people even if they don’t have six hours a day to devote to it.”
Researchers at the Bionics Institute are also using the same cues that Andrew Oxenham described to me as useful for hearing in noise to see if they can tease out ways to use them to make listening to music not just more accurate but more enjoyable for people with implants. In their research, “we just have simple musical melodies that repeat over and over that the brain can learn easily,” explains research scientist Hamish Innes-Brown. “Then we vary those notes in loudness, pitch, location, etc. We try to get people to detect that modification. We want to change the signal as little as possible—get the most streaming bang for your perceptual buck.” They also recently commissioned composers to create music specifically for cochlear implant users. The musicians spent nine months or so visiting the institute and learning about implants. One named Natasha Anderson impressed Innes-Brown by asking for the center frequencies of all the implants. “She’s actually tailored this sound to fit all the exact frequencies.”
• • •
By the day of the open kindergarten music class, I had spent a lot of time considering what words Alex could understand and say, but I hadn’t thought deeply about music and how he experienced it, except that he loved it. Maybe he liked the sound of marbles in the dryer—the little rascal wasn’t above putting marbles in the dryer. But it was more likely that that’s not what it sounded like to him. Music and dancing were such favorites that at Clarke his end-of-year gift had been a book called Song and Dance Man. He has a hard time keeping up with song lyrics, but his favorite family activity for years was a “dance party,” which entailed putting on music and having all of us boogie around the living room.
“Does he respond to music?” was one of the questions the doctor asked when we were trying to figure out why he couldn’t talk.
“Yes,” we had to say, “with gusto.”
When I began to look into research on music and cochlear implants, the mystery was explained. There was one group that consistently reported greater enjoyment of music: those who still had some hearing in the non-implanted ear and used a hearing aid. Furthermore, even profoundly deaf people enjoy the vibration and beat of music. The all-deaf rock band Beethoven’s Nightmare was featured in the PBS documentary Through Deaf Eyes. The group’s drummer, Bob Hiltermann, said he depended on both vibrations and his hearing and that the band played “really, really loud” so that the musicians could hear themselves. He joked about attending a rock concert: “It was really too loud for the regular hearing person,” he said. “They’re going to become deaf themselves. But we already are, so it’s perfect.” In a lecture on how to listen to music with your whole body, deaf percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie remembered what she said to her first teacher when he asked how she would hear the music: “I hear it through my hands, through my arms, my cheekbones, my scalp, my tummy, my chest, my legs, and so on.” Glennie even plays without shoes, the better to hear the music with her feet.
That, I suspect, was some of what Alex experienced when he danced around the living room. He didn’t hear everything that we heard, but he loved what he did hear. He listened with his whole body. Music brought him joy, just as it had millions of other people over the centuries. But dancing around the living room is not the same thing as performing music in class. At school, there was an audience. The children would have to demonstrate knowledge and skill. Would performing music in this way kill the joy for Alex? Was I setting him up to fail? At a demoralizing dance performance, he was once the unfortunate child whose partner didn’t show up, and though he gamely went through the routine with the rest of the class, he was behind from the start and never caught up.
I read through the music teacher’s three-page description of what the children were going to do like a doctor searching a medical history for signs of trouble. Trouble showed itself quickly in the section about the importance of “inner hearing”:
Inner hearing in music is an essential tool needed to sing in tune, read music, create musical compositions and to improvise melodies. The Kindergartners are able to tap beats while singing melodies in their heads. Honing the inner voice is not only essential for the professional musician but for the lifelong lover of music.
Was my child able to do that?
And what about this part about how “once children are able to clap the rhythm of the words to the song, transferring the rhythm to a percussion instrument is a given.”
Was it a given for Alex?
Maybe. Hands down, researchers have found, rhythm is easiest for implant recipients to perceive. They do nearly as well in listening tests as those with normal hearing. That’s because the information that has to be processed occurs over seconds, not milliseconds, and it doesn’t require the fine-tuning that other musical elements do. With each beat, an electrode will fire. Discerning the exact frequency doesn’t matter. This is why percussive instruments such as drums and piano are easiest for implant recipients to appreciate. (And probably why, when Beverly Biderman embarked on her own musical study experiment, the first music that sounded good to her was Glenn Gould’s recording of The Goldberg Variations on the piano.)
Pitch and timbre are much more difficult. Is one pitch higher or lower than another? Some implant users can answer that question, but some can’t identify even an octave change. Pitch is essential for following a melody, but not nearly so important in understanding a sentence. It will tell me whether I’m listening to a man, woman, or child, but I don’t absolutely need to know who is speaking to know that he or she said “Excuse me” or “May I have some water?” In music, however, the only way I can differentiate between “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” is by following the changes in pitch. Pitch is essential to melody a
nd melody is essential to appreciating music.
Like localization, pitch is an area where Alex’s two modes of hearing might not always be helpful. His low-frequency hearing in the left ear probably conveys some pitches fairly accurately, but his implant may tell him something completely different about the same note—the frequency shift that Mario Svirsky had explained to me. If you compare the sound frequency spectrum to a rainbow, an implant recipient can see the ROYGBIV colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—but he or she cannot see any of the colors in between, Charles Limb explained. Furthermore, the information they get may not be accurate—the equivalent of seeing orange as red.
In studies of timbre, less than half of implant recipients were able to correctly identify musical instruments. Non-musicians make mistakes, too, but their mistakes are less frequent and tend to be within the same instrumental family, such as confusing an oboe with a clarinet. Implant recipients might mistake a flute for a trumpet, a violin for an organ.
At least I knew that Alex should have no problem with the drums in the music class. They were arrayed in rows on the floor of the gym. The xylophones were lined up behind them. Looking around the gym, a space I had been in many times over several years, I noticed how small movements in the bleachers rang out loudly and how the noise of the children as they settled into their spots on the floor was like a low roar. Static or feedback in the public address system was suddenly not just annoying but worrisome. (The year before, I’d been at a memorial service where the microphone didn’t work well and two family friends with hearing aids—men in their seventies—told me they couldn’t understand a word that was said.)
After some discussion on the importance of being quiet in music class—something for which I had new appreciation—the group started in on the traditional standard “Engine, Engine Number Nine.” With sixty-some kindergartners chanting at different tempos—fast and slow—the gym qualified as an “in noise” condition. Just as Usha Goswami had recommended, the children were playing with rhythm and rhyme and having a great time doing it. Alex seemed as happy as anyone.
Next, the kids took turns at easels where sheets of pictures—a frog, for instance, repeated in rows and columns—helped them tap the beat. The teacher had devised a game in which children tried to tap with the chant and end on the last picture at exactly the last beat of the song. I wondered if Alex could distinguish the separate words of the song to help him distinguish the beats. In the same way that other children think “LMNO” is one letter when they are first learning the alphabet, he often has trouble separating sounds. In general, though, tapping a beat like this should be quite possible for Alex. And it was.
After a few variations of this and some drumming and xylophone playing, we were nearly at the end of the class. I was beginning to think I shouldn’t have worried so much. For the last exercise, the teacher mentioned the inner hearing he had written about in the handout. He was going to sing a melody. The children had to listen and then play it back on a two-tone wood block, improvising as they decided which tone went with which beat. Hands shot up around the circle of children to volunteer, Alex’s among them. At least he’s enthusiastic, I thought. The teacher picked a little girl from the right side of the circle, and then, from the left side, he picked Alex.
Stunned, I sat up sharply. What could he be thinking? Inner hearing, he said. Inner hearing! This teacher had just chosen Alex to demonstrate an activity that was all about hearing, in front of more than one hundred people. I knew that this particular teacher had taken a special interest in Alex. As a musician, he was naturally interested in sound. Did he know something I didn’t know? Had he practiced with Alex? I didn’t think so.
The little girl went first. The teacher sang:
Bah, bah, ba-di-di, bah,
Bah, bah, ba-di, ba-di, bah.
The girl picked up her wood block and played it back perfectly. After a round of applause, she returned to her place in the circle.
Now the only child standing in the middle was Alex. The teacher sang a slight variation:
Bah-di, bah-di, ba-bah,
Bah-di, bah-di, ba-ba-bah.
Alex picked up his wood block and played it back a little more tentatively than his classmate:
Bah-di, bah-di, ba-bah.
Slight hesitation:
Bah-di, bah-di, ba-ba-bah.
The teacher started applauding just before Alex reached the end—the only sign that he might have been nervous about putting Alex on the spot. Alex gave a shy smile and trotted back to his seat.
He did it! The lowly wood block was as spectacular to me in that moment as a Steinway grand set up in Carnegie Hall. Around me, everyone was clapping and murmuring approval. “He did great,” the mother sitting next to me said. But I don’t have the sense that anyone else quite understood the significance. It was bigger than Alex somehow. It called to mind the decades of work and dozens of people who had made it possible for my child to have this experience.
Not far from the foot of the bleacher steps, Alex assembled with his class, each kid waiting to hug a mother or father before they returned to their room. I was trying to keep myself collected. When I reached the gym floor, he ran into my arms. “I am so proud of you,” I said into his ear and held him for a few seconds longer than normal. Then we said good-bye.
I made for the door, trying to avoid conversation and weaving through the other parents still milling around. Then I saw a woman coming against traffic, heading straight toward me instead of the door. She caught my emotional eye. It was a mother whose son had been identified with moderate hearing loss the year before. He now had hearing aids, and I had helped guide her through the early steps in the process—both bureaucratic and human. She stopped in front of me.
“That was pretty amazing,” she said with a grin. She put her arms around me. “Yes,” I mumbled into her shoulder, “it was.”
26
WALK BESIDE ME
The Marketplace cafe at Gallaudet University sits at the bottom of a two-story atrium. The large center staircase and the railings above make it possible for students and teachers to communicate across long distances. And they do. From the stair, one young woman is waving, using her entire wingspan, to get the attention of a friend on the floor below. Some students are flirting, a girl coyly showing a boy something on her cell phone and laughing. A young man at another table is telling his friends a story and everyone is rapt. A Looney Tunes cartoon is playing on the television mounted to a pillar above me. As I eat my lunch and check my e-mail, I find the soundtrack annoying and, for a moment, I wonder why they don’t shut it off. Then I remember that I am one of very few people in the cafe who can hear it.
Since it’s a lovely September afternoon and I have time, I decide to find a bench in the sun on the green running through the middle of campus—the whole place is known as Kendall Green after the property’s original owner, Amos Kendall. On the way, I pass the community bulletin boards. The postings are exactly the same as at every other college campus (a basketball fund-raiser, coming-out stories, a bike-share program, a religious group advertising a talk entitled “What Am I Doing Here?”) and utterly unique (a Deaf history lecture series featuring Deaf heroes of World War II and the lives of Deaf photographers, a chance to be in Deaf America’s Got Talent, a lecture on reducing split visual attention in the classroom, an information session on studying abroad in Italian Sign Language). Among the campus happenings are advertisements that share the theme of accessibility, like a local hairstylist who has learned ASL and a mechanic whose business is called Deafwrench’s Garage.
Outside, young people pass me in Go Bison sweatshirts—the mascot was adopted in the 1940s for its power and fleetness. A couple holding hands lets go briefly to communicate and then grabs hold again. A fraternity trying to drum up members is frying bratwurst outside the student center. The student body is notably diverse, with more students in wheelchairs than you would see elsewhere and a few who are both deaf and blind
. Cell phones are in everyone’s hands, but no one holds one to an ear—they’re for texting and e-mail only, exactly as hearing teenagers I know use them. Here, too, I’m aware of how much sound there is. A lawn mower thrums nearby. Sirens blare on Florida Avenue. (Earlier, and alarmingly, I’d seen a student nearly get hit by a fire truck.) There’s an occasional bark of deaf laughter from the bratwurst table. Perhaps the noise is heightened by the quiet that otherwise surrounds me.
This was my second visit to Gallaudet. A few months earlier, in the summer, I had spent two weeks on campus in an intensive ASL course. My journal entry the day I arrived says simply: “I am here.” Since those early nights when I was trolling the Internet for information on hearing loss, the place had loomed large as the center of Deaf culture, with what I presumed would be a correspondingly large number of cochlear implant haters. By the time I got there in 2012, I no longer imagined I would be turned back at the front gates, but just the year before a survey had shown that only one-third of the student body believed hearing parents should be permitted to choose implants for their deaf children.
The current conversation is much more subtle. It’s less about cochlear implants and more about the value and endurance of ASL and Deaf culture and of “a visual way of living.” In 2000, the National Association of the Deaf revised its position on cochlear implants to declare them “a technology that represents a tool to be used in some forms of communication, and not a cure for deafness.” The number of Gallaudet students with cochlear implants stands at 10 percent of undergraduates and 7 percent overall. But implants still stir strong emotion. As a hearing person paying a few brief visits, I could only hope to scratch the surface of the truth of Gallaudet today. I would try at least to do that.
I Can Hear You Whisper Page 31