‘Like the brakes of a train never coming to a stop’: author Michel Faber on the torture of tinnitus | Michel Faber
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Whee! I have tinnitus. It came on in 2017. That was decades after I attended the loudest concerts of my concert-going life – such as the Birthday Party in Melbourne’s Seaview Ballroom in 1983, after which my ears rang for days, or the Young Gods in the Sarah Sands hotel in 1992, which rattled the windows, warped the walls and damn near lifted the roof.
My tinnitus came on in my own quiet home, at a time when I couldn’t bear to play a CD, not even at the lowest volume.
People who know me well know that when I stop listening to music, something must be badly wrong with me. But none of my friends was in a position to notice the dust gathering on my audio gear. I was alone in the flat at the time. Just me and the tinnitus. What caused it? Possibly the stress of the nervous breakdown I was having. Or maybe it was provoked by me sticking sharpish objects into my ear canals to scrape out maddeningly itchy wax. Whatever. One month I was a human whose head was silent when there was silence. The next month I was a human whose head has a sound in it that a person next to me can’t hear.
That sound is still there, six years later. You can sit by my side if you like, with your ear against my head. At that proximity, you may hear air being sucked softly into my nose by my lungs, if you’re not distracted by the same pneumatic activity happening in your own body. But you won’t be able to detect the metallic squeal – like the brakes of a train that’s forever cutting its speed and never coming to a stop. That sound is mine alone.
Our eardrums are conceptually no different from the drums we see a drummer playing – the world is playing us
I can make the ringing in my ears much louder by pushing my jaw forward. This fact reminds me that my ears are structures made of bone, flesh, hair and membrane, whose design is subtly altered when I alter the shape of my face. We think of hearing as a sort of magical receptor into the brain. We think the sounds exist in the world, enter holes in the sides of our heads and travel into our minds. But that’s not really the way it is. The world is intrinsically silent. When trees fall or bombs explode or violinists pluck pizzicato, all that happens is that the surrounding air is disturbed in various ways. Atmosphere is displaced. This displaced atmosphere is what enters our ears, and we do the rest. Our ears and brains are musical instruments. To be precise: our eardrums are conceptually no different from the drums we see a drummer playing. The world is playing us.
This has big implications for how we perceive music. Push your jaw out. Does it create a ringing sound in your brain? If not, your head is a different musical instrument from mine. There are many different shapes of head in the human population, and many different designs of ear, and infinitely various brains floating in their bony globes of cerebrospinal fluid. Most probably, they all make slightly different noises when the world plays them. And you will never know, because you can’t help assuming that you hear the same way the next person hears. Of course, it could be argued that there is a basic design to which we all conform. We are a specific kind of hominid primate, after all, not insects or crustaceans or even apes. But there’s a limit to the standardisation. We are all handmade and organic – no prefab components or artificial substances whatsoever. Imagine 8bn guitars, all handmade, manufactured in 195 different countries using local materials. How many will work exactly the same?
Face it: you are a different guitar from the people around you.
Maybe a very different guitar.
My hearing used to be pretty good. By that I don’t necessarily mean I experienced music in a superior way to Brian Wilson, who had only one functioning ear to make God Only Knows with, or in a superior way to the eminent percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who has been profoundly deaf for her entire career. I just mean that when I was manufactured, nothing went wrong and all the bits were present and correct. As we grow older, we typically lose some “top end” – the ability to detect higher-pitched treble sounds. Since my 50s, I’ve been turning the treble knob on my music system’s amplifier up full.
Is tinnitus unbearable? Possibly, for some. The language that people who have it use when describing it can be pretty extreme. “Desperation”, “distress”, “disabling”, “debilitating” and “suicide ideation” are fearsome words. The link between tinnitus and suicide, however, is tenuous. The story of the man who was told by doctors there was nothing they could do to stop the ringing in his head and who immediately jumped off a tall building seems to be an urban myth. Mostly, people just learn to live with the humiliations that afflict their ears (and their eyes and their joints and their teeth) as they grow older. They have to.
Even so, there are days when my yearning to switch my tinnitus off becomes uncomfortably acute. It’s about consent, and lack thereof. Certain pieces that I might play for pleasure, by Pan Sonic or Einstürzende Neubauten, generate sounds very similar to my tinnitus. But I choose to play them at that moment. Whereas my tinnitus never asks if I’m OK with a high-pitched whine. It follows me into the toilet. It gets into bed with me.
What’s interesting about the ailment is that it is relieved by noise. One popular treatment option is a “tinnitus masker” – an audio feed which patients describe as the sound of wind in trees or a waterfall. Me, I don’t fancy hearing waterfall noises when I’m not actually standing next to a waterfall. My remedy for tinnitus is to play music.
Some music, such as the aforementioned Pan Sonic, occupies similar frequencies to the tinnitus. Other music – for example acoustic folk or solo piano – definitely doesn’t. It makes little difference to me. What helps is not the specific noise the music makes, but the quality of my concentration. Maybe I’m laying new auditory pathways, or maybe I’m just not sophisticated enough to notice a high-pitched whine when I’m focusing hard on five other sounds.
I once met a man whose eyes were damaged in such a way that he perceived large dark cylinders floating right in the middle of his field of vision. In time, these obstructions faded away. The damage to his eyes had not been repaired and the cylinders must therefore still have been there. But he’d trained himself not to see them.
This is what I’m trying to do with my tinnitus. Some days are better than others.
My tinnitus has taught me to be more aware of my organic nature, rather than conceiving of myself as a self-contained consciousness – an operating system – installed in an android console. I am not a ghost in a machine. I am meat and gristle and osseous tissue. I am the same category of creature as the once-living contents of my spaghetti marinara. On the sole occasion I’ve cooked a pheasant, I was puzzled by all the weird little bones it had, so many more than you find inside a chicken. What were they all for?
The human body has so many odd little bits, and while some of them are for fairly basic purposes like making more humans or digesting food, others are for judging such conundrums as whether the 2017 Decca remaster of Georg Solti’s 1962 rendition of Verdi’s Aida brings out sufficient nuances to counterbalance Solti’s tendency for Wagnerian bombast, or whether the mono mix of Aretha Franklin’s (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman has the edge over the stereo one, or whether the spectral unravelling sounds in Björk’s Unravel might be backwards clavichord.
It beggars belief that we process something as exquisitely subtle as music using only the most absurdly lo-tech tools – bits of bone, lymphy gunge, tiny bundles of hair.
It’s like equipping a spaceship with an engine made of twigs, rubber bands and cheese. But it flies.