I’ve spent the past three years writing about how music has changed for me – from being a hearing person, to a deaf person, to a cochlear implant user. The song that I keep coming back to as my example piece is “Take On Me” by A-ha. I’ve talked about how each time I listen to it I hear something new – a nuance that I missed before. Well, recently I got to have the ultimate listening experience as I caught A-ha live twice on a visit to the UK. It was both amazing and awful and I loved every second of it.
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She used to be mine
It’s been over 4 months since my last blog – which is good, in the sense that it means nothing major has changed with my hearing. My LIFE on the other hand… In any case, I did make some pretty major changes to my hearing programs last month, and again earlier this month – and they have pros and cons. One of them being that I cut my music program completely!
Continue readingSomeone like Adele
I’m occasionally known for expressing unpopular opinions on the internet. Here’s another: I don’t really like Adele. I tried, I really did. I like her songs and her style, and she seems like a pretty good person. But I don’t like her voice, which given that she’s a singer, is probably the most important piece. Yet, just about every song I hear on the radio that I don’t already know, sounds like her to me, so I suspect much of this is an aspect of my bionic hearing that my brain hasn’t figured out yet.
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Laurel, Yanny, and the Art of Listening.
The Laurel/Yanny thing that took over the internet was absolutely fascinating to me. It happened to come at a time when I was already challenging myself with focusing on specific sounds, hearing dominance, and sound balance. The number of people saying how weird it is kind of astounded me because it’s what people with hearing loss deal with every day – and then I remembered that “normal” hearing people don’t have any reason to know about or understand the mental aspect of hearing.
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The Elusive Electrode #16
Mapping (program adjustment) of a cochlear implant is a tricky thing. There’s no one formula that works for every person. It’s not like programming a computer where there are 20 ways to do something and it either works efficiently, works okay, or just doesn’t work. CI mapping is more of an art than a science, at least from a patient’s perspective. This week, my artist/audiologist helped me find my own art again.
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