Every morning I wake up with a sizzle in my head. It’s not what a musician with the vocabulary to describe sound and timbre would call ringing because it’s not bell-like; the soundtrack – superimposed over the daily routine of stifling the alarm on my cell phone and the subsequent zombie-shuffling over to activate the coffee machine – is more like a high, at times nearly imperceptible frequency. It’s a thin whistle. Is it 6k hz like sibilance? Or 8k? Maybe it lives all the way up toward the top of the range of human hearing, occupying that space that recording engineers tend to call “air” when they EQ tracks. Truthfully, I’m not certain of the frequency, but it’s there alright.
For better or worse, its omnipresence doesn’t mask much of anything. At least nothing I’m aware of yet. All year long, I hear the birds shrieking at each other between the trees behind my fourth-floor apartment. Every morning, I can clearly discern a tiny dog’s muted protests in response to its owner’s absence in one of the units downstairs. Late mornings are often discolored by the bass of some middling adult rock trash and unnecessarily shouted phone conversations seeping through the wall from the retiree next door.
The noise in my ears, though persistent, does nothing to drown out the scamper of squirrels in the dry leaves at a distance, or further still, the elderly neighbors who live on the other side of the tree line; engaged in conversations about the weather, my condition never hinders my ability to pick out the finer details they trade about the climate in suburban Central Virginia. As intrusive as my tinnitus can be, it never shields me from these far off threats, either. On late Thursday afternoons in the warmer months, comfy country rock outfits and singer/songwriters delight their 50-and-above seated audiences on the back patio of a newly built activity center a quarter-mile away from the stage. I hear more than I want to of their songs — the applause too.
That is, unless I’ve got earbuds in, or one of my many higher-end mixing headphones on. Or I’ve got my home studio monitors going loudly. Or if I’m getting ready to go on tour, I’ll have the nine-pound Lunchbox amp on my desk powered up as I run through the set with a playlist beaming Bluetooth from my 11-year-old MacBook Pro to my most recent investment, a pair of $100 Edifier stereo speakers.
As a hired-hand guitarist and bassist with a solid enough knowledge of music production, I spend a good deal of my waking hours trying to master my home recordings or piecing together the tracks from sessions tracked in actual studios — at least rooms that have acoustic treatment. Perhaps more importantly, these studios provide me the solitary and fixed sense of on-the-clock purpose thats much more difficult to achieve at home. As you may imagine, it can be challenging to deal with that high-end shimmering in my head when I’m regularly subjected to club monitors, rehearsal room cymbal crashes. Or else, when I’m easily losing grasp on rising decibel levels, lost in a mix at home.
I have devised the following techniques to deal with this unwanted audio companion that has become a part of my life in the last three years. Some help alleviates the problem measurably, while other tactics just ease my mind, even if they’re not actually offering any relief. All of these approaches have been devised through trial and error but are ritualized at this point to try to lighten what is a clear case of tinnitus, but one that has not at all been reversed or lessened with the help of the medical community as of my writing this.
First Step: Stop Other Ear-Related Problems
When I was a kid on Long Island in the late 1970s, between waiting out bloody noses, destroying KISS records with the vinyl-tearing needles on garage sale turntables, and flailing at baseballs, I spent a considerable amount of time recovering from earaches. They were usually dismissed as a recurrent side-effect of various childhood illnesses and they never left any noticeable physical damage behind. When my parents benevolently took my brother and me to see KISS live in 1979 for our birthdays (my 7th, his 11th), mom doled out the earplugs. I wedged them in, then curiously popping one out for mere seconds during opener Judas Priest led to tears and quickly confirming the fact that wearing them was the only way to go for my virgin ears.
Years later as a teenager bashing away at bad thrash metal covers in basements, I didn’t take the proper steps for hearing protection. After the repeated self-imposed trauma, my laissez-faire approach was eventually abandoned for newfound determination once the post-practice ringing and temporary half-deafness got to be too much. Being that we teen metalheads knew of no practical way to turn down the volume of the drums, earplugs won out as a clear panacea. As I opted for the foam variety designed to keep jackhammering muted, everything I played from that moment on sounded like it was underwater, muddled, with the bass up and the treble way down. There would be no more crash, crack, and simmer from music, just thump and bump.
But the choice to put any barrier between the hours-long noise sessions and the inside of my head was a wise decision. Uncharacteristically for me at that time, I maintained a practical point of view about it: what I was losing in enjoyment, in the crackle of biting amp feedback and slicing cymbal attacks, I was gaining in ear health. And, hopefully, I was buying back some time before I inadvertently rocked myself deaf.
Of course, shows and rehearsals were only part of the threat. A move to New York City after graduating from college in 1994 meant that day after day of squealing subway wheels and all the other loud joys of urban living soon took up residency in my ear canals. Further still, both in my home apartment studio and upstate where I would track in more professional recording environments, volume levels regularly reached unhealthy levels, steadily and stealthily gaining on me and my peers without notice until it was time for a coffee or bathroom break. Only then would it become clear we were making it much harder on ourselves to be objective, having the sound blare back at us so aggressively. Maybe we’d turn it down and start over. Or often, we’d just wait a bit and get right back to it.
My policy of wearing earplugs at practice and shows was one thing, but unrestricted naked earholes during recording continued for decades. Ringing never remained an issue for very long after the studio sessions so I felt that I had no reason to worry.
By 2010, a few homes later on, the unexpected decision was made to move to São Paulo, Brazil. There, like a culturally insensitive but entirely absurd comedy act, one samba drum school or another always decided to meet for practice directly under my window in the months leading up to Carnival — starting about 11 months out. Additionally, my centrally located high-rise space meant that I could count on no less than two different daily protests (everything from political corruption to drug laws) revving up in front of the centrally located art museum across the street. As a result of all of those factors and sharing a bed with a sometimes-snoring partner, I got in the habit of sleeping with foam earplugs in every night. The pre-emptive plugging helped my sleep, but I began to grow paranoid that I was masking too much, conditioning my ears to become too sensitive during the day by clogging them up nightly. The internet would neither remove nor confirm my fears, and eventually, multiple doctors poo-pooed my worry. I continued sleeping with them every night despite the possibility that the apartment building may burn down and I might very well be the last to know about it. Charred or not, the possibility didn’t hinder my quest for quiet.
Life Changes, Hearing Changes
A decade later, I moved back to the U.S., coupled with a new partner, and joined a different band. Then the pandemic hit. We all know how that went.
I, like many, was desperate to get vaccinated and ready to do whatever it took to squelch the fear of a disease that was ill-defined and ever-changing. When the first shot was found to be available two-plus hours from my home in rural Southwest Virginia, I took the drive. While I don’t regret getting vaccinated and the subsequent boosters (having even getting this year’s booster, too), I harbor a lingering suspicion that the sizzling in my ears was a byproduct of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
I have no proof of this, of course. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, and I‘ve talked myself away from concocting any sinister storyline. But it is worth mentioning that the high frequency I hear began right around the time I became vaccinated. A few noncommittal Google searches revealed data along the lines of 6% of vaccinated people have complained of new tinnitus symptoms.
Yet there was more than just the onset of a constant sizzle. I started to experience the regular, disconcerting and unbalanced feeling of having all sound sucked out of one ear. It strikes at any moment, causing temporary near-deafness on one side of my head or the other, and within roughly 10-15 seconds my hearing slowly returns to normal, as if some joker is playing with the mixing board in my head, bringing the fader back up and returning existence to stereo.
The fear lingers though. Every time the silence happens, I’m always convinced that this is the time my hearing will abandon me for good and I’ll be deaf in my right — or left – ear forever. Luckily, that hasn’t happened. Yet.
Oh, and the third unsettling development to simultaneously arise? The surprising appearance of a high A-flat note in my right ear when I yawn. (I’m sure because I checked with my guitar.) Over time, that occurrence has subsided, if not just about disappeared (knock on wood); but it was there, loud as a test tone through headphones. Yawn, and I’d be greeted with an incredible pitch that popped in to say hi; whenever I was bored, trying to wake, or getting sleepy before bed.
Unsatisfied by self-diagnosis and any online answers, I sought the insights of a professional. I wanted a proper diagnosis and a checklist of steps to rectify the situation by testing from an audiologist and I also pursued a thorough check-up by an otolaryngologist. What I got was something else.
Some Crackpot Ideas and a Disappointing Consultation
The audiologist’s test proved revealing enough: she pointed out that my hearing was all good, minus a dip around the 6-8k part of the spectrum. Maybe I was overcompensating when mastering records and torturing everybody. It was good information to have, but it didn’t deal with the sizzle.
Next up, I was escorted to the doctor at the same office in a different room. A thin grey-haired man in his late 50s listened to my full description of difficulties and nodded.
“Yeah, I have it, too,” he said, without a hint of hope.
“And?” I asked.
“Well, there are a few things you can do to make it less annoying,” he said. He talked about things like meditation, white noise machines, and therapy for anger.
“That’s it?”
“I’m afraid so.” The doctor shrugged.
Undeterred, I backtracked and detailed all the specifics of my condition so he would have a more precise understanding of what was really going on with me. He stood staring intently at the floor, pausing to take it in or perhaps waiting to find a break in my grievances so that he could recount more of his own suffering.
“Well,” he said, “when I go to the gym and do that superman move where you lay on your belly then raise your arms and legs off the floor, my tinnitus goes crazy.”
He could offer me nothing beside commiseration.
Realizing there were no imminent and easy fixes, and with a three-week tour to the west of the U.S. looming, I figured I had better protect what hearing I still had left. I decided to get custom earplugs for the stage; a $200-plus investment that seemed worth my while.
Checking around my hometown, I settled on a place known for selling hearing aids to the elderly and made an appointment to get a fitting for the ear molds. When I walked in, I couldn’t help but notice that half the office was dark and the magazines in the waiting room were three years old. A young woman had me fill out a form and walked me back to a room where the technician, slightly older but still in her 20s, was in a bad mood and clearly taking it out on her secretarial assistant.
Feeling like I had disrupted a lovers’ quarrel, the audio professional eventually turned my way, dismissed her assistant, and set to work. She gave me ample warning that she’d be filling up my entire ear canals with a hardening liquid and let me know that it would “be weird and a little claustrophobic.” A paste sealed my ears shut. It was simultaneously like someone emptying a tube of toothpaste into my soul and pushing me to the floor of the deep end of a swimming pool. Cold and unnerving. When the filling set, she went to remove it, starting with the right ear. But it wouldn’t budge.
She pulled harder. I screamed in pain. She shouted to ask if it felt any looser and I told her it felt like she was pulling out part of my brain. She tried again. I screamed even louder. She froze. Her eyes darted back and forth in confusion. She called for the receptionist, perhaps not entirely sure she hadn’t gone too far into my head or made some terrible, irreversible error. I immediately had visions of running to more capable hands in an Emergency Room.
She clenched her jaw in determination. One more time she pulled. One even louder scream came from somewhere inside of me, somewhere behind the hardened plaster, slightly muted, but clearly expressing my agony.
I told her to go away and that I’d do it myself. I yanked. It hurt like hell but at least I was in control of the pain. I looked down at the pink wad shaped like the inside of my ear, checking for veins, or at least blood. Nothing, luckily.
When I finally got the other one out, she examined my ear with a medical instrument. Seeing the inflamed skin from the pulling trauma, she suggested that I was allergic to silicone. Brilliant diagnosis.
She suggested I make a follow-up visit with her dispirited helper, but even had I received a written apology and a full refund for the procedure, I would never step foot in that torture chamber again.
The molds for the custom ear plugs were sent off and three weeks later the custom earplugs arrived. They came in an impressive trapezoidal case and were constructed of a flashy black glitter material, but they were uncomfortable to wear and, worse, didn’t work as well as I had hoped. I found that the definition and clarity that the company promised for playing music was actually only delivered by the cheap, disposable variety. I now use generic $25 ones from Amazon. They’re made out of silicone.
It All Comes Out at Night
Ultimately, much like the unhelpful doctor, I do, in fact, just live with the tinnitus. But as a touring and recording musician, it’s not easy to make sure that I’m not making it worse every day of my life when I do what I love.
The silicone earplugs are a constant, but that’s in the face of live noise. When recording, I regularly rely on the SoundID app as it has a safe mode that keeps volumes low. Full disclosure: I regularly crank up the volume as a result, which keeps it less than optimal for ear health, but not nearly as loud as I would have the potential to pump it up without any guardrails.
Conversely, it’s the silent moments that have become increasingly challenging when living with tinnitus.
Trying to get to sleep, even back in the cricket and frog silence oft Central Virginia, can be the worst. As documented clinically by doctors, caffeine and alcohol can exacerbate the suffering, and because I am a human in the modern world, I cannot stop myself from partaking in either coffee or booze. The results are often immediately noticeable when I lie down for the night.
The answer? Noise and lots of it. A humidifier on full blast. Not one, but two white noise machines cranked to maximum. I use a single earplug in my left ear with my right ear engulfed in the pillow. I don’t know for sure if I’m making things worse by constantly surrounding myself with white noise during the small hours, but it beats the alternative. Focusing on the sizzle and staying too aware of the hiss in my head can lead to the need for more therapy: audio and mental. I could all too easily picture the audible manifestation of all of my problems expanding into a constant reminder that things are never perfect, never without flaws, and never without unwanted sounds.
I suppose it does beg the question about why my hearing got to this point in the first place? What is it about the modern world of music that we are able — or in the teenage mind of decades passed “free” — to crank it up way past the point of good sense?
The physical danger of loud heavy metal as glorified explicitly in lyrics and practiced live to the point of stupidity by the bands I listened to growing up definitely had an impact on me and my friends and our views of music. We needed to feel it.
And for years, feeling it meant volume. It was only considerably later in my life when I understood that there can be no thunderous sections without the delicate breath of a brooding passage. But the pattern had already been set in my early days when I was determined to ascend to the heights of rock stardom, I followed the instructions and aspired to the bombastic, purchasing ever larger and larger amplifiers. That is, until I realized the directionlessness of it all.
Post-punk and goth music, for all of their posturing and long list of clichés, saw to it that I would come to realize I could downsize, use a much smaller amp, play lighter at times, and yes, deal with the fact that the fame I sought would not arrive by my emitting the loudest chords on the planet. Fantasizing never lasts forever without a harsher ending; in my case, the reminder of past mistakes, a heavy payment for the short-sighted recklessness of youth that now ceaselessly echoes within my head.
Most of us at some point learn to replace the irrepressible tide of imperfections that life gives us with our own music. No matter how irregularly its measures nor how unharmonious it may be, this is ours and we have to hear it.