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Another ADer (neecy) posted this on the Captioning and Sign Language Interpreter board, but I thought I'd post it here so people don't miss the opportunity to read this excellent article:
Deaf musician with CI
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Music to his ears
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, January 14, 2007
BY RICK MASSIMO
Journal Pop Music Writer
Richard Reed says that for the decade or so that he couldn’t hear, most people would react to what he calls “the Beethoven factor” — the sad irony of a musician who can’t hear the music he’s making.
But for him, the worst part was the lack of contact with people.
“I couldn’t play. I couldn’t listen to music. Couldn’t hear the phone, couldn’t watch TV without closed captioning. Couldn’t talk to my pals or anybody I cared about. Or anybody.”
Thanks to the operation that’s allowed him to hear again, he can do all of these things.
“I’m not the guy I would’ve been had it not happened,” he says, “but I feel like me again.”
And the whole experience has given him perspective.
“You realize what a luxury music is. I took that stuff for granted. We all do.”
Now, the man who says “I wasn’t much of a giver for a couple of decades there” helps people in situations similar to his and speaks nationwide about his experiences.
Is his story inspirational? Reed doesn’t seem very comfortable with the baggage of the word.
“I hope not, but I suppose it is.”
Reed, 50, started playing when his brother taught him the organ part to “96 Tears” in 1967.
“We did a battle of the bands,” he remembers, “and that was that. A few months after that, we were playing for sailors and floozies down at the QI [Quonset Inn] in North Kingstown all summer long.”
Eventually, he began playing with local rock bands such as The Hi-Beams and The Schemers, and playing rhythm and blues at home and on the road with local and national acts such as Duke Robillard, Ronnie Earl and Jr. Walker.
Reed says that the classic Hammond organ was his instrument of choice, rather than the related-but-different piano. “It got me gigs that were better than I was. If I was strictly piano, there were plenty of guys better than me.”
After spending years “on and off the road” while based in Rhode Island, Reed was living in Manhattan in 1989, The Schemers having broken up, when he got a call to audition for Rhode Island blues stalwarts Roomful of Blues.
They were, in fact are, inveterate road warriors.
“Their idea of an audition,” Reed says, “was ‘Come with us from Maine to Florida and back.’ ”
While in Atlanta with Roomful, Reed suffered from abdominal pain, which was diagnosed as peritonitis. Eventually, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of the digestive tract. During emergency surgery, he was bombarded with a heavy dose of powerful antibiotics.
The antibiotics served their intended purpose. But along with bacteria they killed Reed’s cilia — the tiny hairs in the inner ear that stimulate the nerves, which in turn transmit the electrical impulses to the brain that translate to sound.
IT STARTED off as tinnitus — a persistent ringing in the ears. But Reed’s hearing deteriorated from there.
Reed remembers thinking his alarm clock was defective, because it wasn’t waking him up anymore. But the new one wasn’t waking him up either. Then he thought his teakettle was defective, because he couldn’t hear it whistling. But he couldn’t hear the new one either.
It’s very easy not to notice, Reed says. “You can walk around with a mild loss, and you’re not doing well in noisy places, but you’re doing OK.”
His progression through the stages of hearing loss — mild to moderate, moderate to severe, severe to profound — took about two years.
Reed moved back to Rhode Island in 1991 — “I needed more people around who cared about me.” He enrolled at URI and finished his degree in English. And he spent the next few years sitting in with friends whenever he could, at clubs, weddings and private functions.
In the summer of 1992, Reed was swimming on the beach in Narragansett. A wave slapped him hard in the right ear — the one that he was using for all his telephone calls. He went to a doctor, who diagnosed a broken eardrum. It eventually healed, but during that time he realized how bad his hearing was.
Soon he was having conversations by reading lips. And his hearing continued to diminish. “As my communication skills got better, my ears kept getting worse.”
Reed began wearing hearing aids. He started taking lip-reading lessons with audiologist Jim Healey, who also coached him in the use of hearing aids.
They weren’t working. “I used to think, ‘If only you could adjust these things,’ like I’m used to with keyboard technology,” Reed says. “… But it was my ears.”
EVEN WITH the hearing aids, Reed started losing the ability to hear the notes at the top range of his keyboard. Then the “top” got bigger. Soon the upper half of the keyboard was gone. And the range of notes he couldn’t hear kept spreading downward. Today he can demonstrate on an electronic keyboard in his East Greenwich home by turning down the treble, playing bass parts with his left hand and playing right-hand parts not on the keys but on the keyboard’s plastic outer case.
Musicians tend to work in noisy places. And it was natural to assume that the volumes he typically worked under were to blame for his hearing.
“He was really struggling,” remembers guitarist Emerson Torrey, Reed’s bandmate in The Schemers. “At the volumes we played at — it was daunting [even] for me to listen to it. … It’s hard enough to play music, and then not to be able to hear what you’re doing on top of it.”
“I thought it was an occupational hazard,” Reed says. “But it got so bad, really rapidly. …
“I got a hearing test, and the audiologist thought I was kidding. My ears were so bad and I was walking around trying to deal with people.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, playing wasn’t easy.
Guitarist Thom Enright would put an American Sign Language chart with the hand signals for A through G on his amplifier so people could communicate what key the next song was in. “That was kind of pretending,” Reed says. “You start a song, and you tell me it’s in G, and go [he imitates a rhythm]….
“I could feel the drums, and a little bit of the bass would resonate,” he says, so he knew where he was oriented in the song. For higher pitches, such as the ones he was playing, he got through on knowledge and experience. “I know what B-flat’s going to sound like if you’re in the key of G. … If I was playing accordion, it was all tactile — the vibrations on my chest and the pumping of the bellows.
“He always kept such a great attitude,” says singer, songwriter and guitarist Mark Cutler, Reed’s former Schemers bandmate with whom Reed would sit in often. “He knows most of my songs anyway. … It was a pretty big act of bravery.”
The feeling is mutual. “It says something about my pals,” Reed says, that they let him play. “I don’t know if it was fair to [them], to play those gigs. But it fulfilled some part of me that wasn’t getting anything. I couldn’t turn on the radio and hear a tune. I never heard Nirvana.”
Even though he couldn’t hear what he was playing, the friendships he had with musicians, and the rhythms of nightclub life, were comforts.
“I’d drive home, and I hadn’t had a conversation all night that wasn’t me kind of bluffing, pretending I had heard the punch lines and stuff. But I’d feel more like my old self just for having been in the room where people are jumping around, and the guitarists are making those squinty faces they make — I missed that.”Sometimes Reed’s intuition wasn’t enough. He recalls playing one night with Enright, bassist Marty Ballou and harmonica player Chris Turner. He went to take a solo, and nothing came out of his electronic keyboard. But he didn’t know it.
“All the guys were looking at me like ‘What the hell is going on?’ The cord had come loose. So there was nothing going on. But in my head I thought I was hearing it. …
“After that I didn’t play for a long time.”
WHEN REED wasn’t playing, his relationships were suffering along with his hearing.
Reed largely blames himself. Among friends and family, he says, “You’d see sadness in their eyes. And instead of saying, ‘Here’s what I need you to do’ — write some stuff down, learn some sign language — I didn’t handle it right. I tried to fool people into thinking I was following along. …
“My pals were so good about it, I think they enabled me to try to pretend to be my old self. Which is sweet — a few of them would give me a hard time, but not as hard as they probably should have.”
“You could tell he was drifting off into himself,” Torrey says. “He couldn’t say, ‘I can’t hear what I’m doing, and I can’t even talk to you guys anymore.’ But that’s what was going on.”
“Every time I had a conversation with somebody,” Reed says, “it reminded me of the loss.”
“It was really sad,” Cutler remembers, “because he was a great musician, and for him to be robbed of that, it killed us all.”
His most normal relationship, from a communication standpoint, was with his infant niece, Gracie, born in 1999: “All of a sudden there’s this person who doesn’t know how to use words, and words don’t matter. … And it was great: Make a noise, Gracie laughs. …”
“And when she started being able to speak, I couldn’t hear her, and it was going to deteriorate.”
That was when he started considering a cochlear implant.
THE COCHLEA is a little organ in the inner ear shaped like a snail and the size of a pea.
Normally, the cilia stimulate nerves in the cochlea, transmitting sound to the brain. In the implant process, an electrode is inserted into the cochlea. A receiver on the outside of the ear that looks much like a hearing aid takes sound and turns it into a digital signal.
The signal is transmitted directly into the cochlea, much like a microphone turns sound into electricity and delivers it to an amplifier. The process is different from that of a regular hearing aid, which simply takes sounds and makes them louder.
Reed resisted the idea of an implant for a long time.
He’d heard of the operation, and had been online to hear samples of what a cochlear implant would sound like. He asked his hearing friends to listen as well. Healey told him to check it out — at least, he’d lip-read less.
But there were risks. The technology wasn’t advanced enough to reproduce music accurately. And the surgical process would destroy whatever hearing Reed had left in the affected ear. Although by this point, there wasn’t much left to risk.
“I didn’t have any hope of this thing working,” Reed says, “but I figured, what the heck. … I was e-mailing guys from MIT, and they’d tell me, ‘Come on; you can’t communicate with people, you can’t use the phone — get one of these things.’ And I’d be saying, ‘Yeah, but what will “96 Tears” sound like?’ ”
Reed remembers bringing Gracie home from the beach in 2001. “She was talking to me from the back seat — simple little one-word stuff. And I kept asking her to repeat it, and I was looking in the rear-view mirror, trying to lip-read it. And she was getting frustrated with me. …
“And I just knew that was going to separate us.”
Dr. Brian Duff performed the operation at Rhode Island Hospital on Oct. 7, 2002 — Gracie’s third birthday. The operation took about 2½ hours.
The surgeon drilled through the mastoid bone in Reed’s skull to get to the left inner ear, and scooped away a little bit of bone so the unit would sit flush against Reed’s head. Magnets on either side of the scalp held the exterior unit in place. (It’s a little unnerving to see Reed put a piece of metal on his head and have it stick.)
Dr. Duff says that he’s done about 100 implant operations, about 40 in Rhode Island in the seven years the implant program has been offered.
There are a few restrictions, Dr. Duff says, but not many. Recipients should be careful around static electricity, because it could wipe out the unit’s programming; Dr. Duff advises putting anti-static pads under computer desks, for example. (As with all recipients, Reed’s programming settings are on file.) A recipient shouldn’t have an MRI if he or she can avoid it. And “it probably wouldn’t be a great idea to swim with it if you didn’t have to,” though some newer models are waterproof.
The day after the operation, Reed went for a walk on the beach near his home.
“There was this sound going on, like wind chimes. And I could hear the melody of it, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. And it was the sizzle of the waves coming ashore. And I could play it! I went home and learned the notes.”
But even then there was a lot of work needed — the brain has trouble adjusting to the new information, and the way in which it is delivered. “It’s like my dad listening to Jimi Hendrix — he never would’ve made that adjustment. But when you don’t have a choice, that makes it a little easier. …
“Every note was like two or three notes. It was like throwing the piano up in the air and having it land on a few notes.”
So Reed went to work.
AFTER THE OPERATION, Reed would come up to Torrey’s studio, and they would play together, while Reed figured out what he could and couldn’t hear, what adjustments the device needed, and what adjustments would come naturally as his brain learned how to process the new information.
Eventually, one octave came into tune, but a little distorted. And a lot of harmonics were louder than fundamental tones.
Not good enough.
Reed started seeing audiologist Geoff Plant, of the Hearing Rehabilitation Foundation in Cambridge, Mass., within a couple of weeks after his “turn-on,” and continued to work with him regularly for about 18 months. Mainly, they worked on speech-perception skills, Plant says, but from early on, they worked on music. “That was his big disappointment”
Cochlear implants have been around since the ’80s, but at first they could reproduce only environmental sounds. In the past five years, Reed says, the technology has become good enough that people “take hearing and speech for granted. And now everyone wants to hear music.”
That’s still a problem. According to Reed and Dr. Duff, cochlear implants are primarily designed to work with the relatively narrow frequencies of human speech. The technology still isn’t ready to handle the tonal and polyphonic complexities of music. Once sounds get into higher musical ranges, Plant says, you start to lose pitch distinction. And three or four instruments at the same level “just becomes a cacophony, really.”
Implant recipients tend to prefer music that has a real distinction between the lead voice and backing, Plant says, giving Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” and Arlo Guthrie’s “City of New Orleans” as examples.
“If you want to listen to, say, “Rhapsody in Blue,” you’re probably going to be disappointed, at least in the short term. And I’m not sure that the long term is any better.”
For Reed, music sounded distorted — like someone standing too close to a microphone, or like a radio that’s not quite tuned to the station it’s receiving. The more instruments playing, the louder the music, the worse the problem was.
He kept a positive attitude, though. “I’m used to distortion, and I think that gives me a leg up.”
Reed says that on Jan. 1, 2003, he went to hear Enright play. “The band was noisy and strange-sounding,” Reed remembers. The variety of timbres and pitches was overloading the unit.
But when Enright started a song on his own, the guitar sounded fine. “And that’s when I knew it was going to happen.”
Plant and Reed kept at it. First, they did some simple pitch-matching exercises. Plant would sing two-note melodies, and Reed would try to duplicate them. Then Plant would sing melodies from Swedish folk songs — melodies he knew Reed wouldn’t know — and Reed would work to copy them.
Reed worked hard, and it showed. Plant would tape the sessions, and he says that eventually people who heard the tapes would say “it was hard to believe that someone with an implant could do this.”
Dr. Duff agrees. “He’s off the charts in how well he does.”
PLANT SENT Reed to Kate Gfeller, a professor at the University of Iowa who studies musical perception. Gfeller says that Reed is one of the “stars” among implant recipients. “Not only did he seem to enjoy music,” Gfeller says, “but he did so much better on most of our tests than the typical recipient does.”
Reed’s early struggles with music were common, Gfeller says.
“I have had implant recipients describe music as sounding like a cage full of squawking parrots,” says Gfeller, who teaches in the school of music, the department of speech pathology and audiology, and in the Iowa Cochlear Implant Clinical Research Center in otolaryngology at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Another patient described the sound of a church organ as “like a train coming into the sanctuary.”
But Reed was able to overcome it. “He can use his memory of musical sounds,” Gfeller says, “compare it to what he’s hearing, and his brain can start to fill in the gaps.”
It was a lot of trial and error, Reed and Gfeller both say.
Gfeller says the main factor is in the brain. It’s not a question of intelligence, but of “more effective sequential processing.” Some people’s brains, Gfeller says, do better with “spare or degraded information. They seem to be a little more efficient at making sense of — and using —that information, even if it’s not quite right.”
Gfeller says the work she’s done with Reed will help to set up research models for determining what sets the most successful recipients apart.
Gfeller says Reed also set realistic expectations, likening his situation to someone with an artificial limb. “They can’t maybe do all the things they used to do, but it’s pretty impressive and they get a lot of joy out of it.”
But even more important, she says, it’s about effort.
“I think he’s an illustration that the human brain is the best processor. … And I think that gives hope to other [implant] recipients, that maybe they can get more than they’re getting right now, with some effort.”
Reed, Plant says, had to come to terms with “the fact that music is now different. First unacceptably so, now acceptably.”
And he began putting his life back together.
“It took him a little while longer,” Torrey remembers, “but he decided he wanted to play with us again. It was like coming back from the dead. How else do you explain that?”
Before Reed’s operation, Cutler says, “I was always doing a sort of soundcheck with Dickie — seeing how loud I should talk so he could hear me.” The first time Cutler spoke with Reed after the implant, he started crying.
Now Reed plays keyboards and accordion with Cutler and Enright at their acoustic performances in clubs around Rhode Island. He also plays several shows a year with the reunited Schemers. “It sounded strange to me. It sounds good now.”
But the acoustic shows work best for Reed.
“That feels better to me than full-tilt rock ’n’ roll. It’s easier to hear, and I think maybe just being 50 has something to do with that. … Music is still a little distorted, but almost in a good way.
“If we could trade ears for a minute, you’d say ‘Oh no! It’s horrible!’ But to me it’s beautiful.”
REED SAYS that the irony is that The Schemers broke up largely because they couldn’t find success outside Rhode Island. Now, he travels across the country and in Europe speaking about cochlear implants and music on behalf of Cochlear, the company that made his implant.
He speaks largely to gatherings of audiologists and researchers, and gives them the human angle of hearing loss and restoration.
Deaf musician with CI
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Music to his ears
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, January 14, 2007
BY RICK MASSIMO
Journal Pop Music Writer
Richard Reed says that for the decade or so that he couldn’t hear, most people would react to what he calls “the Beethoven factor” — the sad irony of a musician who can’t hear the music he’s making.
But for him, the worst part was the lack of contact with people.
“I couldn’t play. I couldn’t listen to music. Couldn’t hear the phone, couldn’t watch TV without closed captioning. Couldn’t talk to my pals or anybody I cared about. Or anybody.”
Thanks to the operation that’s allowed him to hear again, he can do all of these things.
“I’m not the guy I would’ve been had it not happened,” he says, “but I feel like me again.”
And the whole experience has given him perspective.
“You realize what a luxury music is. I took that stuff for granted. We all do.”
Now, the man who says “I wasn’t much of a giver for a couple of decades there” helps people in situations similar to his and speaks nationwide about his experiences.
Is his story inspirational? Reed doesn’t seem very comfortable with the baggage of the word.
“I hope not, but I suppose it is.”
Reed, 50, started playing when his brother taught him the organ part to “96 Tears” in 1967.
“We did a battle of the bands,” he remembers, “and that was that. A few months after that, we were playing for sailors and floozies down at the QI [Quonset Inn] in North Kingstown all summer long.”
Eventually, he began playing with local rock bands such as The Hi-Beams and The Schemers, and playing rhythm and blues at home and on the road with local and national acts such as Duke Robillard, Ronnie Earl and Jr. Walker.
Reed says that the classic Hammond organ was his instrument of choice, rather than the related-but-different piano. “It got me gigs that were better than I was. If I was strictly piano, there were plenty of guys better than me.”
After spending years “on and off the road” while based in Rhode Island, Reed was living in Manhattan in 1989, The Schemers having broken up, when he got a call to audition for Rhode Island blues stalwarts Roomful of Blues.
They were, in fact are, inveterate road warriors.
“Their idea of an audition,” Reed says, “was ‘Come with us from Maine to Florida and back.’ ”
While in Atlanta with Roomful, Reed suffered from abdominal pain, which was diagnosed as peritonitis. Eventually, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of the digestive tract. During emergency surgery, he was bombarded with a heavy dose of powerful antibiotics.
The antibiotics served their intended purpose. But along with bacteria they killed Reed’s cilia — the tiny hairs in the inner ear that stimulate the nerves, which in turn transmit the electrical impulses to the brain that translate to sound.
IT STARTED off as tinnitus — a persistent ringing in the ears. But Reed’s hearing deteriorated from there.
Reed remembers thinking his alarm clock was defective, because it wasn’t waking him up anymore. But the new one wasn’t waking him up either. Then he thought his teakettle was defective, because he couldn’t hear it whistling. But he couldn’t hear the new one either.
It’s very easy not to notice, Reed says. “You can walk around with a mild loss, and you’re not doing well in noisy places, but you’re doing OK.”
His progression through the stages of hearing loss — mild to moderate, moderate to severe, severe to profound — took about two years.
Reed moved back to Rhode Island in 1991 — “I needed more people around who cared about me.” He enrolled at URI and finished his degree in English. And he spent the next few years sitting in with friends whenever he could, at clubs, weddings and private functions.
In the summer of 1992, Reed was swimming on the beach in Narragansett. A wave slapped him hard in the right ear — the one that he was using for all his telephone calls. He went to a doctor, who diagnosed a broken eardrum. It eventually healed, but during that time he realized how bad his hearing was.
Soon he was having conversations by reading lips. And his hearing continued to diminish. “As my communication skills got better, my ears kept getting worse.”
Reed began wearing hearing aids. He started taking lip-reading lessons with audiologist Jim Healey, who also coached him in the use of hearing aids.
They weren’t working. “I used to think, ‘If only you could adjust these things,’ like I’m used to with keyboard technology,” Reed says. “… But it was my ears.”
EVEN WITH the hearing aids, Reed started losing the ability to hear the notes at the top range of his keyboard. Then the “top” got bigger. Soon the upper half of the keyboard was gone. And the range of notes he couldn’t hear kept spreading downward. Today he can demonstrate on an electronic keyboard in his East Greenwich home by turning down the treble, playing bass parts with his left hand and playing right-hand parts not on the keys but on the keyboard’s plastic outer case.
Musicians tend to work in noisy places. And it was natural to assume that the volumes he typically worked under were to blame for his hearing.
“He was really struggling,” remembers guitarist Emerson Torrey, Reed’s bandmate in The Schemers. “At the volumes we played at — it was daunting [even] for me to listen to it. … It’s hard enough to play music, and then not to be able to hear what you’re doing on top of it.”
“I thought it was an occupational hazard,” Reed says. “But it got so bad, really rapidly. …
“I got a hearing test, and the audiologist thought I was kidding. My ears were so bad and I was walking around trying to deal with people.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, playing wasn’t easy.
Guitarist Thom Enright would put an American Sign Language chart with the hand signals for A through G on his amplifier so people could communicate what key the next song was in. “That was kind of pretending,” Reed says. “You start a song, and you tell me it’s in G, and go [he imitates a rhythm]….
“I could feel the drums, and a little bit of the bass would resonate,” he says, so he knew where he was oriented in the song. For higher pitches, such as the ones he was playing, he got through on knowledge and experience. “I know what B-flat’s going to sound like if you’re in the key of G. … If I was playing accordion, it was all tactile — the vibrations on my chest and the pumping of the bellows.
“He always kept such a great attitude,” says singer, songwriter and guitarist Mark Cutler, Reed’s former Schemers bandmate with whom Reed would sit in often. “He knows most of my songs anyway. … It was a pretty big act of bravery.”
The feeling is mutual. “It says something about my pals,” Reed says, that they let him play. “I don’t know if it was fair to [them], to play those gigs. But it fulfilled some part of me that wasn’t getting anything. I couldn’t turn on the radio and hear a tune. I never heard Nirvana.”
Even though he couldn’t hear what he was playing, the friendships he had with musicians, and the rhythms of nightclub life, were comforts.
“I’d drive home, and I hadn’t had a conversation all night that wasn’t me kind of bluffing, pretending I had heard the punch lines and stuff. But I’d feel more like my old self just for having been in the room where people are jumping around, and the guitarists are making those squinty faces they make — I missed that.”Sometimes Reed’s intuition wasn’t enough. He recalls playing one night with Enright, bassist Marty Ballou and harmonica player Chris Turner. He went to take a solo, and nothing came out of his electronic keyboard. But he didn’t know it.
“All the guys were looking at me like ‘What the hell is going on?’ The cord had come loose. So there was nothing going on. But in my head I thought I was hearing it. …
“After that I didn’t play for a long time.”
WHEN REED wasn’t playing, his relationships were suffering along with his hearing.
Reed largely blames himself. Among friends and family, he says, “You’d see sadness in their eyes. And instead of saying, ‘Here’s what I need you to do’ — write some stuff down, learn some sign language — I didn’t handle it right. I tried to fool people into thinking I was following along. …
“My pals were so good about it, I think they enabled me to try to pretend to be my old self. Which is sweet — a few of them would give me a hard time, but not as hard as they probably should have.”
“You could tell he was drifting off into himself,” Torrey says. “He couldn’t say, ‘I can’t hear what I’m doing, and I can’t even talk to you guys anymore.’ But that’s what was going on.”
“Every time I had a conversation with somebody,” Reed says, “it reminded me of the loss.”
“It was really sad,” Cutler remembers, “because he was a great musician, and for him to be robbed of that, it killed us all.”
His most normal relationship, from a communication standpoint, was with his infant niece, Gracie, born in 1999: “All of a sudden there’s this person who doesn’t know how to use words, and words don’t matter. … And it was great: Make a noise, Gracie laughs. …”
“And when she started being able to speak, I couldn’t hear her, and it was going to deteriorate.”
That was when he started considering a cochlear implant.
THE COCHLEA is a little organ in the inner ear shaped like a snail and the size of a pea.
Normally, the cilia stimulate nerves in the cochlea, transmitting sound to the brain. In the implant process, an electrode is inserted into the cochlea. A receiver on the outside of the ear that looks much like a hearing aid takes sound and turns it into a digital signal.
The signal is transmitted directly into the cochlea, much like a microphone turns sound into electricity and delivers it to an amplifier. The process is different from that of a regular hearing aid, which simply takes sounds and makes them louder.
Reed resisted the idea of an implant for a long time.
He’d heard of the operation, and had been online to hear samples of what a cochlear implant would sound like. He asked his hearing friends to listen as well. Healey told him to check it out — at least, he’d lip-read less.
But there were risks. The technology wasn’t advanced enough to reproduce music accurately. And the surgical process would destroy whatever hearing Reed had left in the affected ear. Although by this point, there wasn’t much left to risk.
“I didn’t have any hope of this thing working,” Reed says, “but I figured, what the heck. … I was e-mailing guys from MIT, and they’d tell me, ‘Come on; you can’t communicate with people, you can’t use the phone — get one of these things.’ And I’d be saying, ‘Yeah, but what will “96 Tears” sound like?’ ”
Reed remembers bringing Gracie home from the beach in 2001. “She was talking to me from the back seat — simple little one-word stuff. And I kept asking her to repeat it, and I was looking in the rear-view mirror, trying to lip-read it. And she was getting frustrated with me. …
“And I just knew that was going to separate us.”
Dr. Brian Duff performed the operation at Rhode Island Hospital on Oct. 7, 2002 — Gracie’s third birthday. The operation took about 2½ hours.
The surgeon drilled through the mastoid bone in Reed’s skull to get to the left inner ear, and scooped away a little bit of bone so the unit would sit flush against Reed’s head. Magnets on either side of the scalp held the exterior unit in place. (It’s a little unnerving to see Reed put a piece of metal on his head and have it stick.)
Dr. Duff says that he’s done about 100 implant operations, about 40 in Rhode Island in the seven years the implant program has been offered.
There are a few restrictions, Dr. Duff says, but not many. Recipients should be careful around static electricity, because it could wipe out the unit’s programming; Dr. Duff advises putting anti-static pads under computer desks, for example. (As with all recipients, Reed’s programming settings are on file.) A recipient shouldn’t have an MRI if he or she can avoid it. And “it probably wouldn’t be a great idea to swim with it if you didn’t have to,” though some newer models are waterproof.
The day after the operation, Reed went for a walk on the beach near his home.
“There was this sound going on, like wind chimes. And I could hear the melody of it, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. And it was the sizzle of the waves coming ashore. And I could play it! I went home and learned the notes.”
But even then there was a lot of work needed — the brain has trouble adjusting to the new information, and the way in which it is delivered. “It’s like my dad listening to Jimi Hendrix — he never would’ve made that adjustment. But when you don’t have a choice, that makes it a little easier. …
“Every note was like two or three notes. It was like throwing the piano up in the air and having it land on a few notes.”
So Reed went to work.
AFTER THE OPERATION, Reed would come up to Torrey’s studio, and they would play together, while Reed figured out what he could and couldn’t hear, what adjustments the device needed, and what adjustments would come naturally as his brain learned how to process the new information.
Eventually, one octave came into tune, but a little distorted. And a lot of harmonics were louder than fundamental tones.
Not good enough.
Reed started seeing audiologist Geoff Plant, of the Hearing Rehabilitation Foundation in Cambridge, Mass., within a couple of weeks after his “turn-on,” and continued to work with him regularly for about 18 months. Mainly, they worked on speech-perception skills, Plant says, but from early on, they worked on music. “That was his big disappointment”
Cochlear implants have been around since the ’80s, but at first they could reproduce only environmental sounds. In the past five years, Reed says, the technology has become good enough that people “take hearing and speech for granted. And now everyone wants to hear music.”
That’s still a problem. According to Reed and Dr. Duff, cochlear implants are primarily designed to work with the relatively narrow frequencies of human speech. The technology still isn’t ready to handle the tonal and polyphonic complexities of music. Once sounds get into higher musical ranges, Plant says, you start to lose pitch distinction. And three or four instruments at the same level “just becomes a cacophony, really.”
Implant recipients tend to prefer music that has a real distinction between the lead voice and backing, Plant says, giving Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” and Arlo Guthrie’s “City of New Orleans” as examples.
“If you want to listen to, say, “Rhapsody in Blue,” you’re probably going to be disappointed, at least in the short term. And I’m not sure that the long term is any better.”
For Reed, music sounded distorted — like someone standing too close to a microphone, or like a radio that’s not quite tuned to the station it’s receiving. The more instruments playing, the louder the music, the worse the problem was.
He kept a positive attitude, though. “I’m used to distortion, and I think that gives me a leg up.”
Reed says that on Jan. 1, 2003, he went to hear Enright play. “The band was noisy and strange-sounding,” Reed remembers. The variety of timbres and pitches was overloading the unit.
But when Enright started a song on his own, the guitar sounded fine. “And that’s when I knew it was going to happen.”
Plant and Reed kept at it. First, they did some simple pitch-matching exercises. Plant would sing two-note melodies, and Reed would try to duplicate them. Then Plant would sing melodies from Swedish folk songs — melodies he knew Reed wouldn’t know — and Reed would work to copy them.
Reed worked hard, and it showed. Plant would tape the sessions, and he says that eventually people who heard the tapes would say “it was hard to believe that someone with an implant could do this.”
Dr. Duff agrees. “He’s off the charts in how well he does.”
PLANT SENT Reed to Kate Gfeller, a professor at the University of Iowa who studies musical perception. Gfeller says that Reed is one of the “stars” among implant recipients. “Not only did he seem to enjoy music,” Gfeller says, “but he did so much better on most of our tests than the typical recipient does.”
Reed’s early struggles with music were common, Gfeller says.
“I have had implant recipients describe music as sounding like a cage full of squawking parrots,” says Gfeller, who teaches in the school of music, the department of speech pathology and audiology, and in the Iowa Cochlear Implant Clinical Research Center in otolaryngology at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Another patient described the sound of a church organ as “like a train coming into the sanctuary.”
But Reed was able to overcome it. “He can use his memory of musical sounds,” Gfeller says, “compare it to what he’s hearing, and his brain can start to fill in the gaps.”
It was a lot of trial and error, Reed and Gfeller both say.
Gfeller says the main factor is in the brain. It’s not a question of intelligence, but of “more effective sequential processing.” Some people’s brains, Gfeller says, do better with “spare or degraded information. They seem to be a little more efficient at making sense of — and using —that information, even if it’s not quite right.”
Gfeller says the work she’s done with Reed will help to set up research models for determining what sets the most successful recipients apart.
Gfeller says Reed also set realistic expectations, likening his situation to someone with an artificial limb. “They can’t maybe do all the things they used to do, but it’s pretty impressive and they get a lot of joy out of it.”
But even more important, she says, it’s about effort.
“I think he’s an illustration that the human brain is the best processor. … And I think that gives hope to other [implant] recipients, that maybe they can get more than they’re getting right now, with some effort.”
Reed, Plant says, had to come to terms with “the fact that music is now different. First unacceptably so, now acceptably.”
And he began putting his life back together.
“It took him a little while longer,” Torrey remembers, “but he decided he wanted to play with us again. It was like coming back from the dead. How else do you explain that?”
Before Reed’s operation, Cutler says, “I was always doing a sort of soundcheck with Dickie — seeing how loud I should talk so he could hear me.” The first time Cutler spoke with Reed after the implant, he started crying.
Now Reed plays keyboards and accordion with Cutler and Enright at their acoustic performances in clubs around Rhode Island. He also plays several shows a year with the reunited Schemers. “It sounded strange to me. It sounds good now.”
But the acoustic shows work best for Reed.
“That feels better to me than full-tilt rock ’n’ roll. It’s easier to hear, and I think maybe just being 50 has something to do with that. … Music is still a little distorted, but almost in a good way.
“If we could trade ears for a minute, you’d say ‘Oh no! It’s horrible!’ But to me it’s beautiful.”
REED SAYS that the irony is that The Schemers broke up largely because they couldn’t find success outside Rhode Island. Now, he travels across the country and in Europe speaking about cochlear implants and music on behalf of Cochlear, the company that made his implant.
He speaks largely to gatherings of audiologists and researchers, and gives them the human angle of hearing loss and restoration.
