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ABSTRACT
“Charlie Haden’s Earplugs” explores how tinnitus, hyperacusis and misophonia have shaped the musicality and sonic production of the jazz bassist and composer. While Haden maintained a negative attitude toward his hearing damage over the course of his long musical career, viewing it as a limitation and a source of difficulty, this paper brings together evidence to suggest that Haden’s condition also provided him a productive means to exert control over his sonic reality. In this way, these maligned conditions are part and parcel of Haden’s personal engagement with the world, and therefore, part of his creative process and distinct aesthetic. This analysis is accomplished by a forensic account of Haden’s listening particularities through his interviews, as well an analysis of his approach as an improvising partner. This paper also draws from extant models of disability studies to explore the concept of “deaf-gain” and how it may be transposed to the disorders from which Haden suffered. There are to-date many well-established accounts of the deaf experience in disability studies and in music scholarship. This paper offers insight to another cluster of hearing dysfunction, which not only suggests a new paradigm for imagining disability in music, but also revises the very concept of hearing as it is commonly understood.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Please begin by listening to Charlie Haden’s bass solo on Ornette Coleman’s “Law Years” from the Complete Science Fiction Sessions.
2. This story has been repeated many times throughout Haden’s life, but is recalled in conversation with fellow bassist, Flea (Leigh Citation2006).
3. In several of his obituaries, he stands aside his own reflection in his Plexiglas (The Telegraph Citation2014).
4. A diligent reader will note that Haden’s etiology of tinnitus et al is non-canonical, and represents his own understanding of his condition, rather than a comprehensive medical definition. Though Haden conjectures his tinnitus may have emerged from playing near loud drummers for so many years, noise-induced hearing loss is just one possible cause for the symptom of tinnitus. I use the term hearing damage, however, to preserve the emotional impact of my subject’s experience of these conditions, without intending to further stigmatize disease.
5. Elsewhere, Haden lectures his students, “We’ve been given special ears. It doesn’t make you better than anybody else, but you’re able to hear things other people don’t” (Smith Citation1997).
6. Haden is not alone. Indeed, many musicians who describe their tinnitus simultaneously describe themselves— eg, their own way of hearing and their way of engaging with sound. I found Barbara Streisand discussing her tinnitus with a daytime show host “Q: What do you hear that I don’t hear? A: I hear high frequency noise. When I went to have my hearing tested, I had supersonic hearing. I hear more. […] And this is one of the reasons I always felt different when I was a kid (Streisand Citation2018, 0:24–0:41).
7. In another interview, he admonishes his students, “you must risk your life for every note” (Gravity Citation1994).
8. Pawel Jastreboff distinguished himself in the field by coming up with the first metric to test for tinnitus in the brains of rats – and later invented Tinnitus Retraining Therapy, a psychodynamic response system for learning to cope with tinnitus in lieu of a chemical or surgical cure (Jastreboff and Hazell Citation2008).
9. Consider, too, microphone feedback – regardless its colloquial association as an “annoying” sound.
10. And indeed, through focused listened onto one’s own troubled relationship to sound, that iterative process of attention-directing might yield a sound that cannot be unheard. In other words, Passive hearing, amplified by active listening, gives way to a new level of hearing.
11. Edelstein et al. (Citation2013) authored one of the first papers to take a stab at creating diagnostic criteria for Misophonia through interviewing people who experience it. Edelstein et al. (Citation2013) also connect the data of misophonic sufferers to normal music listeners, creating data for the psychological experience of this puzzling condition.
12. Whereas the lowercase spelling of deaf indicates the absence of hearing, capital-D Deaf indicates Deaf Culture – positing Deafness as a community rather than a condition.
13. One of Jastreboff and Hazell’s Citation2008 most radical suggestions is to suggest a suicide help line specifically for tinnitus sufferers, to spare them from the affective drama of going to a doctor who will shrug and say “there’s nothing you can do.”
14. It also suggests an aesthetics of hearing too much that refuses generalization. Since these conditions are all subjective, phenomenologically, there is something untranslatable about these disorders – something hyper-personal, which will, by virtue of their specificity, will never translate to a real cultural identity, such as Deafness has.