Making music with hearing loss

Musical Memory: A Church Organist’s Experience with Hearing Loss

Musical Memory: A Church Organist’s Experience with Hearing Loss

While attending church in primary school, Brian found himself counting the pipes of the church organ instead of listening to the sermons. He enjoyed the vast variety of sound an organ can produce in a range of warmth and brightness he could only describe as the “sublime delicacy and awesome power” of the organ. By age eighteen, he was filling in for the regular church organist, and played happily for many years. 

Finding a Community of Musicians with Hearing Loss

Finding a Community of Musicians with Hearing Loss

At eight years old, Jennifer Castellano learned that she had perfect pitch—and found out that she needed hearing aids for a mild to moderate hearing loss in the middle frequencies, known as a “cookie-bite” loss.

Veteran Plays Piano Despite Suicide Bomber Attack

Veteran Plays Piano Despite Suicide Bomber Attack

Captain Mark Brogan lay on the ground of an Anbar province marketplace in Iraq in April, 2006. He had shrapnel in his spinal chord, was missing a third of his skull bone, and had severe arm injuries as well as hearing loss and tinnitus.

A Listening Profit from My Hearing Loss

A Listening Profit from My Hearing Loss

My first career was in management consulting and high-tech marketing, and for the 20 years that I was in that line of work, I spent a lot of time and energy trying to hide my hearing loss.

Paying Attention at a Classical Piano Performance

Paying Attention at a Classical Piano Performance

I’ll admit: I’m not very good at listening to classical music, even at a live concert. The only pieces I can usually fully appreciate at a classical piano concert are ones that are both short and already familiar to me (it helps if I’ve studied them)—and all this only applies if I can see the pianist’s individual fingers moving.

Practice Listening with Your Memory

Practice Listening with Your Memory

Think of a simple song. “Happy Birthday” will do. Imagine the rhythm of the words, the bouncing melody soaring out of you as you make the birthday candles flicker. Hear the happy crowd harmonizing. Feel the music building to a rousing climax as everyone belts out “to you!” at the end.

Practice Listening with Your Eyes

Practice Listening with Your Eyes

One of the most exciting ways to enjoy music is to listen… with your eyes. It’s one of the main reasons you go to a rock concert or orchestra performance instead of just buying the recording. It’s why some pianists become famous and others go unnoticed.

My Key to Music

My Key to Music

I was born with a moderate hearing loss; however, even as a young child I was drawn to music. I remember having a stuffed yellow dog that played “London Bridge Is Falling Down” when the key was turned.

Piano Practice with High-Frequency Hearing Loss

Piano Practice with High-Frequency Hearing Loss

If you listened to all of the recordings of the Debussy Clair de Lune available online, you would need at least eight hours. A GRAND PIANO PASSION™ commenter named Arlette did exactly that, and she chose as her favorite a rendition by Ricker Choi because it measured up to her emotional connection with the piece.

Sound, Vibration, and the Piano

Sound, Vibration, and the Piano

Something that fascinates me is how we can never truly hear through someone else’s ears, we can never be in someone else’s head.

Practice Listening with Your Body

Practice Listening with Your Body

Ever practice piano… without the piano? It may seem strange, but in order to make richer, more expressive music, you need to use all the tools at your disposal.

Friends with Hearing Loss

Friends with Hearing Loss

The shape of Thomas Maitin’s face is almost perfectly round, his complexion clean for someone in his late 50s, the clarity of his bearing hinting at the purity in his music.

Practice Listening with Your Ears

Practice Listening with Your Ears

I want you to add a new element to your piano practice: that of practicing to listen. Listening starts by thinking beyond your fingers and the notes on the page.

Hearing Loss at the Opera

Hearing Loss at the Opera

As I did my research for my new book, Shouting Won’t Help, and talked to many people with midlife hearing loss, a pattern of similarities became apparent.