From Ear to Eternity

Heartbeat is a music magazine that pushes beyond the usual realm of songs and albums, taking a broader view that focuses on how sound makes us feel. This story is a great example of what they do, as Joal Stein reflects on his own use of hearing aids, and the ways in which successive technologies have transformed lives through the ages. (This email is landing a day early to fit around Easter – watch out for a special edition coming next week, reflecting on the first three months of The Mortar…)

There’s a story that my family likes to tell about the time I tried to flush my hearing aids down the toilet. I still remember the shape and feel of those hearing aids – bulky and beige, like a mechanical snail wrapped around my ears. At school, they were paired with an “FM system,” a Walkman-sized black box clipped to my pants, with two cords that connected to the back of my earpieces. The teacher wore one as well, with a microphone affixed to their collar, and the whole apparatus was designed to wirelessly transmit sounds directly into my hearing aids. Though the system was sophisticated, the experience was crude – an intolerably clear, artificial sound blasted right into my ears. Flushing those hearing aids may be my earliest principled act of protest against machines.

These days, it’s perfectly normal for people to walk around with devices in or on their ears. Compact and nearly hidden or bulky and over-ear, listening apparatuses have become status symbols, but only for those who don’t need them. There is still a stigma attached to hearing impairment. Though it affects half of U.S. adults over 60, two-thirds over 70, and four of every five people over 85, fewer than 20 percent of people with hearing loss obtain treatment, which can exacerbate issues with memory loss and mental health. This persistent stigma, which has lasted for centuries, has had an unexpected knock-on effect, driving the development of ever-smaller, more sophisticated technologies designed to improve the wearer’s hearing.

There have been assistive hearing devices as long as there have been humans – a cupped hand, a seashell, a hollow horn – but the first iteration of the modern hearing aid began with ear trumpets. For many, the ear trumpet conjures the image of a large, conical, physically cumbersome instrument that old movies often employed for flat comedic effect, but most ear trumpets were designed to be hidden, even if their small size did not meaningfully improve the wearer’s hearing. Outside of the inconvenience of carrying around large hearing aids, people were wary of being perceived as deaf or hard of hearing.

By the late 19th century, Rein, perhaps the most famous ear trumpet maker, was manufacturing delicate golden whorls obscured by longer hair. Other strategies were hearing trumpets small enough to be concealed in a hand or walking sticks with a trumpet hidden in the top. In the 1880s, the invention of the microphone and telephone – devices that could regulate volume, frequency, and distortion – led to the first electronic hearing aids, which were carbon-based and about the size of lunchboxes. To use one, you had to sit on a table with the microphone facing the person you were speaking to, while you wore the headphones or earphones. They were about as practical as taking an old rotary phone and lugging it around.

Telephone engineers, inspired by practices from phonetics and deaf education, began to conceive of sound as a material signal that could be processed into electrical sound signals. This conception of “sound as signal” allowed for a range of other technological and conceptual leaps. In the 1930s, after AT&T and Bell Labs developed and refined the vacuum tube to amplify electrical signals and sound using only a bit of power, electronic hearing aids finally became portable devices. They could be kept in pockets, worn on clothes, or secured in special harnesses.

Still, hearing aids didn’t become fully wearable until the invention of the transistor, one of the 20th century’s most important technological breakthroughs. (Among other things, it made the modern computing revolution possible.) People were willing to pay high prices for these new hearing aids but wanted even smaller versions. As scholar Mara Mills notes, “Hearing aid users became the first consumer market for printed circuits, transistors, and integrated circuits.” This pressure to create ever-smaller, ever-better hearing aids foreshadowed the consumer trend of electronic miniaturization. However, even as digital hearing aids entered the market, they remained big, bulky, and beige.

This is the type of hearing aid I received in 1990 when I was one, and the pair that I tried to flush when I was seven were digital, too. But in the mid-2000s, hearing aid manufacturers began to integrate Bluetooth technology into their devices. This came with a new set of issues. Bluetooth is notoriously demanding on batteries, and hearing aid wearers had to carry an external receiver around their neck or in their pocket for it to work, slowing its adoption. Nonetheless, as a fourteen-year-old wearing hearing aids equipped with Bluetooth, I heard sound move for the first time in my life. A car in the distance drove by, and rather than simply hearing the sound get louder and quieter, I could tell where the car was and the direction it was moving in. It was shocking – and wonderful.

I experienced this profound level of sensory and cognitive disorientation again in 2019, when I received a pair of smartphone-connected hearing aids equipped with machine learning capabilities. For the first time, I could hear the texture and fidelity of sound; it was like walking through a drug-induced auditory trip. Everything was disturbingly rich – the rough rhythm of a cat grooming itself, the peacefulness of crisp leaves bristling in a late fall breeze. I had a sophisticated machine listening for me, with the ability to recognize the type of room I was in, process sound, and render it knowable in ways previously inaccessible to me. Years before ChatGPT and Claude, I was using AI to expand what I could know about the world.

While hearing aids are designed to mimic the feeling of natural sounds from the external physical world, in every instance, the sound is always re-processed through a series of electrical signals. As machine learning unlocks a broader sonic space, distinctions between natural vs. artificial start to diffuse like a scattering roar. And perhaps, finally, the stigma associated with hearing aids is blurring, too, as the line between assistive devices and personal technologies gets fuzzier. With modern populations experiencing hearing loss more frequently and earlier than previous generations and the legalization of over-the-counter sales, hearing aid adoption is starting to follow the curve that eyeglasses took from assistive devices to fashion statements. New “hearware” providers like Eargo, Orka, Sony, and Jabra market sleek devices in various styles, often in vibrant colors designed to catch the eye. Welcome to the augmentation, my fellow hearware users.

Heartbeat is more than a music magazine. Celebrating the emotion of sound through genre-defying stories that span nature and art, it ventures into the past and looks to the future to explore how what we listen to makes us feel.

Joal Stein is a writer and strategist working across philosophy, political economy, and technology. He currently works on AI and democracy with the Collective Intelligence Project, and his writing has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, LA Times Magazine, and Atmos, amongst others.

Emma Quan is a British Chinese illustrator and graphic designer based in London, specialising in editorial and children’s books. Growing up at the intersection of Eastern tradition and Western environment, Emma creates art that vibrates with the energy of both worlds. You can see more of her work on Instagram.