A Tale of Tinnitus, for What It’s Worth
Stop, now, what’s that sound?
Nature is said to abhor a vacuum. The human ear and brain abhor silence. If auditory stimulation from the outside world is diminished, the brain and the ear will make up for it, creating phantom sounds that are usually labeled tinnitus.
Though it’s often used interchangeably with “ringing in the ears,” tinnitus can in fact take many forms, from beeping and squeaking to buzzing and shrieking. It can also be impressively complex.
In the months after I lost most of my hearing, but before I got my first cochlear implant, my tinnitus, previously a minor annoyance, went into overdrive. And perhaps because I had spent so much of my life immersed in music — dancing to it, cooking to it, driving to it, making love to it — my tinnitus often had a musical element.
At first, for pretty much every waking minute, I heard a tune strongly reminiscent of “Telstar,” the instrumental by the Tornados that became a chart-topper in 1962 thanks to its “weird” space-age sound.
Now, you may think that would be enough to drive a man crazy, but I’m a glass half-full kind of a guy. If I had to have a moldy-oldie instrumental looping through my head, I would’ve preferred something that sounded more like the Chantays’ “Pipeline” or Duke Ellington’s “East…
