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.