This is a story about a man, bad ears, and good music.
Last night I went to downtown to see some music at a nice little pub. The Counterfactuals – recently named Northfield’s best band – played first, doing their usual great set of pop tunes. They sounded fantastic, due (I think) to more rehearsing and gigging and to a sound system that had been set up exactly right. The night’s second act was the Bratlanders, Northfield’s unofficial best band. The Bratlanders were awfully tight, thanks again to more rehearsing and lots of recent shows, and they weren’t shy about playing loud – which was a-okay to me. I was sitting just about as far up front as I could, but thanks to the magic of my hearing aids, the sound never got overwhelming: the aids contain microchips that automatically adjust to ambient sound and feed me an appropriately balanced sound signal. It’s like wearing robot earplugs – pretty slick.
The next morning, an hour or two after getting to work, each hearing aid’s battery died, owing to the extra work they had done the night before, dampening the Bratlanders’ sonic assault. With the two dead hearing aids plugging my ears, I discovered that I didn’t have any spare batteries at work, so I took the devices out and tucked them away until I got home.
This created all kinds of trouble. First and foremost, I’m pretty deaf without the aids in my ears. I can only hear really loud sounds (train whistles) or sounds very close to me (a person sitting a few feet away) – and the latter only if their voice is pitched just right. So I spent all day in a not-unpleasant bubble of quiet and/or asking pretty much everyone, “What was that you said?”
Second, my balance gets bad when I don’t wear the hearing aids – some complex relationship between hearing and equilibrium gets thrown off, and I wind up tottering around. At one point late in the afternoon, I just about took a header as I tried to negotiate a right turn on the stairwell in my building. Classy.
It was a huge relief to get home at five and put new batteries in the hearing aids. The full range of sound! Decent balance! Next time the Bratlanders play, I’ll make sure to have spare batteries with me.