Part One

Sound Became Color

Part One

I guess I can finally write this story in its entirety, all into one piece. At least this way, I can find it for myself maybe years from now so that I can remember the story once again. I compare my story ato possibly; the race for remembering dreams that are awoken from rested, smiling and then soon forgotten with the first steps of day. Honestly, I’m not sure how all of this works but I’ll try to include everything that led me here.

I am Timothy. I am Thirty years old and I live in San Francisco. I used to be completely deaf on my left side. I was told that I could hear as well as anyone else except I’d never be able to tell where sound comes from. I believe now that this is entirely impossible. By using a few different methods of injecting sounds into my head, I found that sounds had been hiding from me in plain sight. I was able to hear it all at once for the first time in my life and the more beautiful they became the sadder it made me. When sound became color I learned how to hear and that simply changed who I am, what I am and everything from here until and so on. The process made me feel something magical and more importantly it helped me be fascinated with sounds and all the life that they contain.

About two years ago I started a project producing a record at home and also at Different Fur Recording Studios. I would work from 0600 to 1300 crunching numbers at an office job and then go home and record. I had an FTP and a few friends, Quel and Anton on the east coast with a drum kit in a practice space that Anton also runs as a recording studio under the name of the Kill Room. I’d record guitars and ukuleles to a click and bounce them over the FTP to Brooklyn. They would come back sounding good.  I’d replay my parts to the drums and bass instead of a click until I got the feel right. Then I’d go down to Different Fur and replay it again there in quick four hours through all the amps that are just warm with reverb through tubes, years of care and work put into making them certain to sound as good as they did when they were made however many decades ago. I had set a time line of three years for the project and was taking it slower then because I was learning.

One weekend during the Holidays I was out in the East Bay with a girl I was into then. We were helping my friend pack her house up because she was moving to Vermont. They are both swimmers and got into conversation about it. She pulled out these headphones that were for swimming underwater out of one of the many half stuffed boxes.  They were basically weird swimming goggles. She held them up to my temple and I heard bits and pieces of Pink Floyd’s, Wish You Were Here. Then she put them back in the box and that was the end of it because we all had places to go it being the Holidays and all. 

I was curious a few days later and found some information on them. They didn’t work with the eardrums; they are worn over the temples. The sound is conducted through the skull. They compared the headphones to a story about Beethoven and how he used to bite a metal rod extending from his piano in order to hear his pieces because he was deaf. The sounds vibrated through the rod and into his bones allowing Beethoven to hear himself play. I was into it. I printed out the article and gave it to my mom because the Holiday was around the corner and she had been asking me what I wanted. I usually don’t get this into presents but I had to try them. They meant hope. Hope that I could one day hear full stereo.

During the Holiday is a good time for recording and I was busy then working with Miles on mixes, or watching him and taking notes. We’d work on the levels of the instruments and effects for a while and then when I would listen back I wouldn’t be able to hear the left channel so I would call Miles and bug him about it only to realize to my own embarrassment that if I’d turned the headphones around I would have heard the missing parts. Even though I had been deaf my whole life things like this would happen too regularly. I had to plan constantly in social situations so that I could hear to my benefit, orchestrating seating arrangements and so forth. I didn’t clearly see how much being deaf in one ear really effected my life until I could hear on my left side and discover how much less work is spent and how much more time is spent enjoying the moments that take place in crowded rooms at venues or even on a walk at the park that doesn’t involve me explaining that I have to be on certain side of a person in order to hear them properly.

{I’ll continue soon.}