Imagine that your hearing sensitivity for pure tones is exquisite: not affected by the kind of damage that occurs through frequent exposure to loud music or other noises. Now imagine that, despite this, you have great problems in understanding speech, even in a quiet environment. This is what occurs if you have a temporal processing disorder
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Historians are tasked with recreating days past, setting vivid scenes that bring the past to the present. Mark M. Smith, author of The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War, engages all five senses to recall the roar of canon fire at Vicksburg, the stench of rotting corpses in Gettysburg, and many more of the sights and sounds of battle. In doing so, Smith creates a multi-dimensional vision of the Civil War and captures the human experience during wartime. Here, Smith speaks to how our senses work to inform our understanding of history and why the Civil War was a singular sensory event.
Sensory overload in the Civil War
Using sensory history to understand the past
How the Civil War transformed taste
Headline image credit: The Siege of Vicksburg. Litograph by Kurz and Allison, 1888. Public domain via the Library of Congress.
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Hearing is clearly the most important sense for a musician, particularly a composer, so the trauma of experiencing difficulties with this sense is hard to imagine. Beethoven famously suffered deteriorating hearing for much of his adult life; an affliction which brought him to despair at times. The cause of his deafness is still unknown, although much speculated upon, but the composer’s feelings about his situation are well-documented: Beethoven kept ‘Conversation Books’ full of discussions of his music and other issues which give a unique insight into his thoughts, and in a letter to his brothers (the Heiligenstadt Testament) he wrote a heart-wrenching description of his sense of despair and isolation caused by his inability to hear.
Despite his catastrophic loss of hearing Beethoven continued to compose — producing some of the greatest works in Western musical history. So how was this possible? How can a musician, particularly a composer, continue without full, or even hyper-sensitive, hearing?
We can get a modern day insight from Michael Berkeley — one of OUP’s composers who, over recent years, has been struggling with hearing troubles himself. Berkeley’s hearing damage was the result of a blocked ear, brought on by a fairly minor cold, which has caused irreparable nerve damage. These days there’s better help available to sufferers of hearing loss. However, sound distortion remains a problem, and hearing aids can only help so far, as Berkeley explains:
“Music was appallingly distorted, and in fact I couldn’t go to concerts as it was just so painful. I got a condition called hyperacusis, where loud sounds are unbearably painful. I got some very good digital hearing aids which made a great difference to speech, but it can only amplify what I’m already hearing so it didn’t help for music.”
Michael Berkeley explains how he continued to write music:
“If you are trained as a composer you can write in your head: you hear the sounds internally, and you’ve been trained how to get those sounds onto the page without a piano or any intermediary. It’s something you learn to do gradually through lots of hard work and by instinct. The problem is, when the music is played back I can’t comment very usefully: what I hear may not be what the conductor or the rest of the audience hear…it could be my hearing disability is distorting the real sound.
“The extraordinary thing is, I realised after a number of months that I was beginning to hear music more clearly. I remember there was a Haydn string quartet on, and I suddenly realised I was hearing it better: I was so overjoyed that I went to bed with an iPod and played it all night long! Apparently what can happen is that the brain begins to rewire itself. We hear with our brains — the ear is essentially a conduit — so if you have a template of musical knowledge then the brain begins to compensate for the distortions. My brain is learning to reprocess sound, and so it’s like discovering music anew: it’s absolutely wonderful!
“I’ve always thought that less is more. In Beethoven’s late music, particularly the late string quartets, the music is pared down to the absolute essentials, and I now find in my writing, partly because I can hear better when I play it back, that I’m beginning to concentrate much more on the essence of the sound and try to rid it of extraneous notes.
“I do feel that the music I’ve written in these last two years is actually as good as everything I’d written up until then: hopefully better.”
Michael Berkeley is the composer of a substantial number of highly acclaimed works, including three operas which have been produced in Europe, America and Australia. In addition to having been an associate composer to both the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Berkeley has had performances of his works given by many of the world’s finest orchestras, ensembles, soloists and opera companies, and many of his works have been released on CD. He is currently composing an anthem for the service of enthronement of Archbishop of Canterbury-elect, Justin Welby, in March 2013.
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The post The Beethoven question: How does a musician cope with hearing loss? appeared first on OUPblog.
The senses are a vital source of knowledge about the objects and events in the world, as well as for insights into our private sensations and feelings. Below is an excerpt from Art and the Senses, edited by Francesca Bacci and David Melcher, in which Charles Spence, Maya U. Shankar, and Heston Blumenthal look at the ways in which environmental sounds can affect the perceived flavour of food.