Making music again with these ears

It’s never quiet for me. I hear several high-pitched tones at once, in both ears. Underneath them there’s something that moves with my heartbeat. As I type this I can point out every one of them. They’re there when I’m not typing too, I just don’t pay attention to them then.

I can trace the start back to a single day. Before that I had the ringing everyone has had at some point, after a night out or after a festival. One night’s sleep and it was gone again. That’s how it always went. Until 8 July 2006, when I was at Van Eigen Bodem, a festival for artists who were being encouraged to perform in Dutch. After that day the ringing never went away.

That doesn’t make it the fault of that one day. I went clubbing for a lot of years. That I produced music myself will have contributed too. That day was probably just the day it ran out.

That festival is long gone. Performing in Dutch is fairly normal now. Earplugs have become just as ordinary in those same twenty years. Everyone puts them in at a club or a festival now, something that wasn’t so normal twenty years ago.

It took a long time before I got used to it. That wasn’t so much because of the sound, but because in the beginning I was mostly afraid of losing my hearing. That fear sat underneath it all the time. That’s the part I kept to myself and the part that shook me most looking back, because in the end the fear was worse than the ringing itself.

After that it faded into the background. For twenty years I’ve mostly just been able to live with it. What I do notice is when it comes back. When there’s a lot of stress I suddenly notice again that it’s there at all. I don’t think it gets louder then. I think it’s always the same volume and in a period like that I just can’t filter it out anymore. The sound is the constant, my attention is what moves.

Over the years it has got worse. That will have something to do with age too. In my right ear there’s a dip above 2000 Hz. I noticed that myself while mixing before I did anything about it. An audiogram from the hospital confirmed it later. Apart from that it doesn’t bother me much. I just hear that something is missing right where I’m deciding how something should sound.

I’ve never said much about it at home. That’s easy enough, because nobody can see it. Since I’ve had a family, they notice something different from what I hear. They notice that I don’t always catch what they say. The ringing is mine alone, but that I sometimes don’t hear my children is something they’re stuck with too.

And now I want to pick up producing again. So that means going back to the hobby that helped do this, with ears that have a documented gap in one spot. They can’t be replaced and they’re not going to get better either.

I don’t know yet what that means for what I’m going to make. There’s software now that takes over part of that work. Some of it makes visible what I should be hearing. With a reference plugin I can put my own track next to a commercially released one and see where it deviates. In the range where that gap is I’m no longer the best judge and that’s fine. What I do know is that I’m going to do it anyway. Right now I’m not waiting on my hearing but on Apple, because I want to see what Macs are coming first.

I’m writing this because it was twenty years this summer. It’s not an anniversary anyone sends a card for. There isn’t much to celebrate about something you picked up at a festival that no longer exists. Nothing has come along that can take it away, though I still hope the next twenty years will.

Until then, it keeps ringing on.

Tinnitus.