Through The Doors Of Sound Perception

“How does my mother perceive sound? “

I'm starting this blog series with the question that opened my perception of life. Not only this but the nucleus that inspired me to make the project “SPIRAL”. A project that travels to ears, ears that we are not conscious about. Ears that have lost hearing when they were born or gradually lost hearing with time.

My goal is to share information with people about stimulating ourselves from other perspectives, keeping an open mind and discovering different realms of possibilities. Everybody will take in the information in a different way.

I have always been curious about life since I was a child, especially seeing my mother everyday with two different machines placed in her ears. Liking them to enormous earrings that she was the only one to wear and made her look so cool. However, I found out she heard differently from the rest of us. This evoked my curiosity in always trying to think how she perceived the sound I was perceiving in different situations and conversations. Although I’ve always tried, I knew I was never going to know. Because it is not only about how the sound vibrations enter your ears but how they are processed through the brain and memory. But to my surprise she always acted normally, sometimes having terrible headaches but always pushing her limits and making efforts not to let her situation depress her.

The key to awaking my curiosity for everything was my mother’s hearing problems and her way of handling them. This made me ask myself so many questions, which led me to the conclusion that I would never know how she truly hears. However, I understood I could still try to perceive and interpret the realms of possibilities inside her head and those of so many other deaf people.

I think that analyzing every situation from different perspectives helped to open my consciousness and subconsciousness and give sense to my project. I try to practice a lot of techniques and perspectives like deep listening, field recording, sound synthesis and the study of music from different perspectives and using varying techniques. However, it was not until this year that I decided to create a project that could portray the inspiration and reflect my perspective of different situations and dimensions. This project is a journey in understanding and being conscious of these living people that live without the key sense of hearing, living in silence, perceiving sound through hearing aids, cochlear implants or both, and feeling the world through internal or external vibrations when they disconnect and take their hearing aids off.

My mother, for example, has one cochlear implant on the right ear and a hearing aid on the left one. The difference is that the hearing aid amplifies real sound when there is still a minimum level of hearing left in an ear and the cochlear implant is used when there is no hearing left at all in an ear, providing a unique mix of real and synthetic sounds.

This helped me to reach the conclusion that all ears are different, all C.O.D.A. users are different, and every individual is different as everybody hears differently. This added a layer of complexity to this project. The recreation of all different types of hearing through aids or cochlear implants was going to be difficult to recreate unless I could study lots of individual cases.

So the perspective I concluded to take was an experimental one.