Overcoming Hearing Loss

[henkejs]

Warning, long post ahead! There are a lot of people here who are passionate about music and know what goes into creating it. I thought this forum might be a good place to share my story.

A lot of "older" people like me have hearing loss. Some of you may be reading this right now. 😄 I also have a rare condition called diplacusis. There are different types of diplacusis, but for me it means my two ears hear the same note as different pitches. The difference is small in the higher frequencies but gets steadily worse as the pitch gets lower. Sometimes this problem makes music sound out of tune. Even simple intervals like octaves can sound bad although a tuner confirms the pitches are right.

I don't know exactly when this problem started or what caused it, but eventually it forced me to give up playing music with other people. Soon after that it got bad enough that I stopped writing and recording music because I couldn't trust what I was playing or singing. If you've heard my music (especially my singing) you know that's no great loss to the world, but it is something I've enjoyed doing for many years.

We can skip over my long and convoluted path to finding a doctor who even knew anything about this condition let alone whether it might be treatable. Eventually I found an audiologist and musician in Ohio who is involved in research related to diplacusis and other hearing challenges affecting musicians. Ultimately, she devised a program of simple exercises to attempt to retrain my brain in order to restore, as much as possible, more normal pitch perception. The exercises involved listening very carefully while playing various notes, scales, and intervals over and over again on the bass guitar until they started to make sense to my ears. After 20 or 30 minutes a day over the course of a few months, it made a significant difference for me. It's still hard to hear pitches in a more complex musical context or in noisy situations, but under controlled conditions music is starting to sound reasonably normal to me again.

To celebrate this progress and put it to the test in a real-world situation, I decided to record a cover of George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps. I picked that song because I've always liked it and because I knew the bass part would be a good challenge for me. The guitar parts would have been impossible for me, but I asked my friend and long-distance collaborator Craig Hansen to help. Craig played the lead and rhythm guitar parts on our version, while I handled the bass and everything else including the mixing, which was a challenge in itself considering my compromised hearing. This was never intended to be a note-for-note copy, but we did try to honor the spirit and style of the original. Here's the track, created on Cakewalk of course:

  https://www.soundclick.com/johnhenke/?content=songs

Note: Craig is a really talented blind multi-instrumentalist from Minnesota who writes and records original music all by himself. I help with getting his tracks ready and uploading them to the various streaming services (there's probably a joke in there somewhere about a partly deaf person and a blind person making music together). If you'd care to hear more of Craig's work, you can find him on SoundClick. His music is also available for purchase on Apple Music and other sites.
 

Edited January 26 by henkejs
Corrected typo.

[craigb]

I hear ya! 😁

[treesha]

Congratulations on making some progress on your condition. I hope it continues to improve as you work at it. Its very nice that you help your talented friend realize some of his potential too !

[Bapu]

1 hour ago, craigb said:

I hear ya! 😁

I was told Marc Daniel Nelson has golden ears but here is the real evidence to the contrary.

For those unfamiliar.....



See? His ears are kinda red.

Edited January 26 by Bapu

[bjornpdx]

Sounds really good to me.  You should post it in the Songs forum.

-Bjorn

[henkejs]

@craigb  WHAT?!

@treesha  Thanks for the encouragement. I appreciate it.

@Bapu  Thanks for helping bump this thread. Stop by any time. 😁

@bjornpdx  Thanks for listening.

[Bapu]

Cover was pretty darn good John.