Grievance #9: I Didn't Hear You Come In... (We Are Senseless, Pt. 3)
I want to note, before we continue, that my good friend (I want to call him a good friend, anyway, in that he is good at being a friend, at least, and because I'll break down crying later if you don't wait to tell me otherwise) Howard managed to remind me that SIEMENS (still a ridiculous name for a company) makes fashionable hearing aids, although they don't seem to be for the more severely hearing-impaired individuals, judging mostly by placement. Anyway, my reply to the very appropriately snark-laden ("Oh yeah? Look at this:" was what followed the upcoming response) question about what I thought of that was this,
"In the case of glasses, you can at least make varying visual choices with them, even though the costs usually keep people from stockpiling multiple pairs. Most hearing aids seem to still be stuck in fairly drab designs and plain colors. I think that the guy who NEEDS hearing aids, who then makes the bold choice to wear neon green lightning-bolt hearing aids, would kind of need to occur as a possibility before the guy who just wants to look like he's lost his hearing by having a fashion accessory could be satisfied.
I confess that I would be dumbfounded if non-functional stylish hearing aids came out first, as a result."
So, considering that Howard responded with the video proving the existence, I guess that just leaves the bizarre possibility of someone being such a hipster that they want to have a fashionable look based upon the disability of someone who can't actually hear normally. In which case, my previous arguments shift to accomodate, in my personal belief. But, now that we've effectively discussed some of the social politics of genetic hearing disabilities or different abilities (as I myself frequently believe them to be, in some cases), let's consider hearing loss in an average lifetime (Mr. Holland's Opus isn't the end-all be-all talking point for families with genetically disabled hearing members, but it certainly should be watched when considering the matter, no matter how sappy some people might consider it to be).
We're killing our hearing, of course, but what's disturbing is how little is really discussed in terms of how this is occurring.
We think that loud is rock 'n roll, but a lot of the people I know seem to have no bloody idea as to why this is the fucking case. If they did, a lot of things would likely be different in the listening habits involved.
As it is, a lot of you are letting the companies dictate your emotions through loudness. Compressing and smashing the volume against the peaks at nearly every second they can progressively more as the years go on, you of course end up convincing yourselves that mp3s somehow sound like the original CD wav files, ¿so who needs to fucking buy those stupid old things? Yeah, the way that happens is by cheapening the quality of the original files to begin with. For more on the Loudness War, I personally recommend the quickest primer at Bob Weston's Chicago Mastering Service, although even I can be enough of a Man to admit that fucking Rolling Stone actually did the best popular journalism piece on the matter in the entire fucking decade. To get any better, you'd have to dig around for some of the more obscure sources that generally agree with this, and/or know a thing or two on the subject (like me and others), so read up, and deal with it.
So there you are, consumer: You're removing critical audio data left and right, tossing out the data of dynamics and space in order to cram more audio onto your fucking iPod, so that it doesn't sound worse in your shitty earbuds. At this point, we have ourselves a bit of a problem, because I think that we know that this is quite a bit of a double standard, perpetrated all in the name of convenience. First off, take a look at what your hearing range actually technically is, at least at the ideal, when you're not fucking it up so terribly. Second, consider that you're going to have to face that it takes a hell of a lot more data to actually give you what the human ear can hear and the human mind can sort out. Now, you're going to then tell me that the data-compressed from that charming little song is the same song? That is akin to suggesting that your darling gal finds my mellifluous voice exactly as uncontrollably charming on the phone, with so many frequencies filtered out, as she would in person (while you're obsessively giving yourself a soundtrack to every moment with your fucking iPod, you self-centered prick). I think we both know better than that (and don't worry about it... I don't find her that attractive anymore, now that she's dating a fucking iPod user.).
On top of it, you're all wearing earbuds, and an alarming number of you are trying to tell me that the convenience of them means that they're acceptable for hearing. No, asshole(s), that's why you have that beautifully-sculpted cartilage outside that we call the ear (even though it really includes the inside canal and various parts as well) in the first place. There's a lot of detail and channeling that those surfaces do, and earbuds are skipping all of that in order to do their pathetically uninteresting and crackly (because they're not that durable, are they?) job. They're also not isolating you from other sounds, so of course you end up turning up the volume even more to shut out other sounds, while you get less data operating in a more narrow frequency range yet at FEWER volume dynamics!
ALL IN THE NAME OF CONVENIENCE.
Oh fine, don't trust me: Trust Pete Towshend, who played guitar for the loudest band ever, who is experiencing his problems primarily through using headphones. That's right: That full-stack, when giving his ears space and room to breathe? Not painful, not like plugging headphones directly into that Marshall head.
Our brains are adapted to compress loud sounds psychologically: Since so much of our hearing does involve our brains, this makes sense as a way to guard the processing functions of the organ from being blown to pieces. But of course, this triggers an alert in the brain that the sound is LOUD, ¡and that attention should be paid! We're back to the "fight or flight" bit, folks, because whatever's making that sound could be BIG or DANGEROUS or BOTH. As it is, we can see by the fact that a large majority of us have that compression and attention occur (at least initially) that the ancestral individuals that had this trait tended to survive, as opposed to others which got lucky, were recessive, or mutated later. That, however, is what we're capitalizing on, and one of many reasons why rock 'n roll has that reputation for danger. Keep doing the sound that loud, and it won't have the same affect: That sensory adaptation that was a good thing now could be our undoing, whether it's the same sense of taste mindlessly repeated over and over again, or the same sound that is played constantly at the same volume. ¿Is it any wonder that a generation that has more battery power to play music being driven into the same narrow volume ranges through headphones so shitty that they have to be turned up louder to get the same decibel effect is more frequently listless than many before?
While I may have an exaggerated view, I do not find this to be a coincidence, that we are becoming so much harder to excite (and anyone that doesn't believe me should attempt to run into each other at rock shows... people look fairly perturbed if anything occurs that is outside of their experience of blankly staring at the performer, something that clearly is outside of viewing a performance outside of a YouTube sub-window) as a populace. As a result, we are entering a bizarre world where I might be one of the few rock 'n roll acts left. My live music has staggering decibel drops, where the dynamics give way so that yelling actually sounds like yelling, and I hit frequencies completely untouched by the average iPod AAC or mp3 file, startling and exciting the audience so that there is clearly some danger, here, even without my bursts of motion. I don't want it to be this way, but it fits directly with what I have noted of the listening behaviors that are occurring. It's only a piece of an overall landscape that I am putting together in other posts on our divisive culture, but this alone fills me with worry and dread, especially when so many people are rationalizing against me. ¿Why, then, do we have so many people that have trouble telling a difference in the audio tonality of a voice, if it isn't because they aren't used to listening for such nuances?
The complexities of the human ear cannot be replaced so easily by hearing aids altogether, in regards to what we are noting, so it does little good to do anything short of protecting it frequently. If you must listen to music (and I must), listen to it on larger headphones, and limit the usage of that, when you can: listen to it in the air (or at least, until bone conductivity-speakers take more of a hold and become cheaper), to capitalize on your whole hearing. I fear a situation in which relatively narrow bands of hearing will be almost completely gone, while wide swaths of hearing will leave us with little subtlety in our world. You see, I am a romantic, of sorts. I find your whispers draw my attention, your sense of projection means something, and when you don't use it, I draw near so as to get you to not whisper as much (and strain your nice voice further). There are rhythms in your language, and I want to hear each time you draw your breath, let alone those hesitations that you give me.
My heroes have tinnitus, and I hopefully only suffer from it in a neurological sense of it, but it is enough to allow me to retain some productive fear. I myself always seem to have the most intact hearing in every band that I am in, and it's a distinction that I find to be of a dubious level of honor. I myself have not finished my piece for 51 guitars, and don't want to quit playing the guitar because of my hearing problems becoming too much, because I know how I could get there.
I also want you to be able to hear me when I offer advice or tell you stories of my ridiculous adventures.
Getting rid of all of that is not worth the convenience. I'll pick out my music before I go out of the house each day, because it never was that much of a problem before, really.
So yes, the data matters, the details matter, the nuances count, and the volume doesn't have to be so high. Let's be quiet, for a while, for about 4 minutes and 33 seconds.