nothin How I Learned To Listen With Earplugs | New Haven Independent

How I Learned To Listen With Earplugs

I was on stage last Saturday at Lyric Hall with the band No Line North. My violin was under my chin, a cable running from it to an amplifier, which ran to the sound system in the room. I was standing next to John Leonard, on bass, and therefore next to his amp. I also liked to be close to Michael Kiefer, on drums. But in the next song, a high-volume, full-throttle rocker, I needed to be able to hear myself — I had a big, loud, solo to do — and I needed to hear Jon Schlesinger on vocals and guitar.

Trouble was, I also needed to have earplugs in, or I wouldn’t hear much of anything at all.

So I turned, one ear toward the drums, one ear toward the empty space over the audience, and took one earplug out. The gamble worked; I could hear what I was doing and still kept my eardrums safe. Then I reached into my pocket and put the earplug back in. (You can see it at the end of the video above.)

My ears have always rung, since I can remember. (They’re ringing right now as I type this.) The ringing wasn’t loud; I could hear it only if it was really quiet, or if I plugged my ears, or went underwater. When I was maybe 5 years old, I was watching a PSA on TV about tinnitus that mimicked the sound. I felt a shock of recognition — hey, that’s what I hear! — even though I hadn’t spent a lot of time on a construction site or gone to a lot of loud concerts, as the commercial suggested I might have.

Perhaps paradoxically, I also (still) hear very high frequencies that most people don’t. Before flat screens, older TVs and computer monitors used to emit a high pitch that I could hear clearly, to the point where I could tell that someone was watching TV from a room away even if the volume was turned all the way down. The pitch wasn’t that different from the ringing I always heard.

I listened to a lot of loud music growing up. In my late teens, I started playing in clubs with a reggae band, which meant that I started going to tons of shows. My ears rang a lot afterward, but they were always better by morning. I never saw anyone use earplugs, and never heard anyone talk about them. I associated them with something swimmers wore to avoid ear infections (which, incidentally, I got every spring from my childhood through college).

As the years went on, people talked about earplugs as a thing they wished they’d worn, and as a thing I should be wearing. For a long time, though, I played essentially unamplified music, which in retrospect is probably the reason I can still hear now, and I didn’t go to a lot of super-loud shows as a spectator.

That changed when I started covering shows for the Indy. I knew the volume was too much right away. I learned to stand in the back of the club where it wasn’t so loud. Or, if I needed to get a photograph, I’d make sure I was between the stage and the house speakers, where the sound wasn’t as balanced, but it was quieter. Cafe Nine sells earplugs. I never bought them.

But in April 2016 I had a hearing scare after covering a triple bill at College Street Music Hall, of Wambura Mitaru, Blitz the Ambassador, and Zimbabwean legend Thomas Mapfumo. (Ironically, this was right about the time freelance reporter Alessandro Powell pitched an article about earplugs, which we published a little while afterward.) I can remember the moment it happened. While I was getting video of the Blitz set, I was parked right in front of one of College Street’s enormous speakers, and in the three minutes I stood there, I could feel my left ear giving out. The show was glorious — seeing Mapfumo live was pretty close to a religious experience for me — but when I got home, I understood the extent of the damage I’d done. There were two tones ringing in my ears, the usual very high one, though much louder now, and a lower one more at the register of a small child’s voice. Underneath these constant drones was a wash of white noise like a wind that wouldn’t stop blowing, or an infinitely churning surf. It was all loud enough to keep me from falling asleep, and it was still there the next day, and the night after that, when I was finally too exhausted to stay awake. On the third day the white noise had subsided but the pitches stayed. They were quieter, but I could still hear them if there wasn’t something else to distract me.

I was terrified. I didn’t go to a doctor. I was pretty sure I knew what they would say, that I’d finally managed to do some permanent damage to my ear that wasn’t going to get better. But I figured I’d give them a chance to heal. I wanted to keep playing music, and hearing music, for the rest of my life.

So at last, I started wearing earplugs.

I’m the sort of person who loses things, especially small things, and especially small things that are new. So I started with Hearos, the package of foam earplugs that you can get at Walgreens, and presumably plenty of other drug stores. The package I bought had 14 pairs for six bucks. I tested them first by wearing them to band practice for the band Mercy Choir, in which I play bass. The effect was as expected; the volume went down for me, and especially the higher frequencies. For the first 15 minutes or so, it was pretty disorienting, but after a while, my ears adjusted. The disposable earplugs (though I reuse them sometimes, which is maybe gross, but there it is) did the trick.

But I don’t usually play bass. I usually play violin, a merciless instrument when it comes to hearing. Losing those high frequencies in the foam earplugs meant struggling to play in tune. My disposable Hearos weren’t cutting it. I played a couple of gigs unamplified and regretted it. What else was out there?

Some musicians with finely tuned ears opt for custom earplugs, often calibrated with help from a doctor. The musicians who do this usually swear by them. Health insurance can cover the cost of the doctor’s visit and the custom fitting. But I was scared away by the price tag for the plugs themselves, which can range upward from $100 — not because I didn’t think it was worth it, but because I was pretty sure I would lose them within a year.

So I got a hold of a pair of earplugs from Etymotic Research, which ran about $25, and put them in my violin case. These plugs ended up being right for me. They lowered the volume but kept enough of the high frequencies that I could play the way I wanted. I could see how some musicians might want a more subtle adjustment to their protected hearing than the Etymotic plugs would provide, or a better fit in their ear. But I have no complaints. The Etymotics live in my violin case now. They feel good in my ears and give me what I need in balancing volume and clarity — like they did at Lyric Hall on Saturday — and they’re the right price for something that I’ll eventually leave in a club as an unintentional tip for the bartender.

As a reporter and audience member, I’m not worried about catching every tiny little sound. The Hearos have become standard for every show I cover for the Indy. I have a couple of them floating around my shoulder bag, a couple more floating around in the camera bag, an entire box in the glove compartment in my car. True to form, I lose them, or run them through the wash in my pants pockets, or drop them in something I don’t want to put in my ear afterward. More expensive earplugs would be much less obtrusive. They’d also be gone by now.

I’ve also found that my brain compensates. Things sound underwater for maybe five minutes, and then it seems normal. When I need to take the earplugs out to adjust them, I’m startled at how loud the music really is, how piercing those high frequencies are, and I’m grateful that I’m protecting myself. Being kinder to my ears has meant that they’ve mostly recovered from that scare in April 2016. The ringing is, I think, a little louder than it used to be, but it’s tolerable. And I still hear those crazy high frequencies that other people don’t.

But now and again, I miss it, that annihilating wave, the music filling my ears, my head. The sense of the music passing through me, of me dissolving into it. Now and again, I get greedy. I recently played a set that was going to be heavy on improvisation, and therefore on communication, and decided I needed all the information I could get. So I took the earplugs out and was glad our set was short. And at Nigerien guitarist Mdou Moctar’s show at Lyric Hall in September, I had my earplugs in, and was already swimming in the rhythm, being carried away in the riptide of Moctar’s playing. The end of his set drew near, and for five minutes, I pulled the earplugs out and let it all come in.

I knew I might pay for it a little bit later. It didn’t matter. It was the most beautiful sound I’d heard all year. I can still hear it now.

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