I have tinnitus, a constant ringing in my ears, the backing track to everything. I’ve had it since I was seventeen, when I was a conscript stupidly firing high-powered rifles without ear protection. Now, in my fifties, I’ve learned to ignore it. Mostly. But as I write about it, it’s there.
Tinnitus can mask higher frequencies, so some bird songs are beyond my hearing. A phone can ping beside me and I won’t hear it.
The strange thing is that the brain compensates. It turns up the internal volume, trying to make sense of what is missing. The result is that some sounds become unbearably loud.
This is hyperacusis. Mine is mild, but a leaf blower, irritating to most people, can become an assault. The chatter of diners in a restaurant turns into an avalanche of sound. Lorries don’t simply rumble past. They sound like the guns that caused this in the first place.
Then there is misophonia, which often occurs alongside tinnitus and hyperacusis: an intense, sometimes irrational sensitivity to particular everyday sounds. Eating. Someone pouring liquid into a glass. Paper or plastic being crinkled. In my case, it can be acute.
If the person behind me in a supermarket queue is inexplicably kneading a packet of crisps, I wince as though I’ve just bitten into a lemon. I’ve left cinemas within the first few minutes because someone two rows back was mangling a packet of sweets.
So here is the irony: I am hypersensitive to sound and, at the same time, increasingly unable to hear it properly. I can hear a packet of crisps being tortured three metres behind me, yet somehow the scrape of a bow on a violin string has become harder to find.
Music, meanwhile, has become streamed, shuffled, skipped and consumed in fragments. Not albums, but songs. Not artists, but algorithms. Not a diamond tip following a groove, but binary code. I found myself listening less, even though I had more music than at any point in my life.
So, in what is a spectacularly irrational response to my auditory shortcomings, I decided to go backwards. Back to an album playing from beginning to end. Back to actually listening.
Back to analogue.
I bought a 1975 Linn Sondek LP12. Legendary, apparently. I knew absolutely nothing about it. I had gone into Turntable Guy’s shop intending to buy a scrappy R2,500 turntable. The technician, Peggy, shook her head in admonition and pointed at the Linn.
Despite being four times the price and 30 years older, it was apparently a bargain for something regarded as a benchmark in high-end listening. The fact that the modern LP12 retains the same fundamental design, albeit with vastly upgraded components, is testament to just how right Linn got it.
The Linn transformed the way I listen to music. Not simply because it is a very good turntable, but because putting an LP on a platter and listening to an entire album is an interactive act. It is physical. Visceral. Non-binary.
You take the record out. You handle it carefully. You set it on the platter, lower the arm, hear the crackle until it finds the groove. And then, for the next 20 minutes or so, you actually listen.
There is no algorithm suggesting a similar track by an unrelated artist. No finger hovering over Skip. No buffet of music demanding that you eat everything and digest nothing. No Wi-Fi cutting out. Just the certainty that the groove will guide the diamond-tipped needle and transform its microscopic contours into delicious sound.
I’ve become increasingly absorbed by the hunt for records. I wade through buckets at festivals and rummage through boxes in cramped vinyl shops, finding records that ignite memories of teenage angst, rebellion and revelation.
One album evokes a DJ mixing tracks beneath the light of a glitter ball, an ’80s beat giving way to a ballad, your hand on a girl’s waist, her hand on your shoulder, a nervous kiss. Her scent comes rushing back to me after 38 years.
Another fills my mind with contraband reggae, censored by the apartheid government, enhanced by the sensation of secrecy and the heady scent of dagga.
A faded cover reunites me with my uncle as he drops the needle on a ’70s anthem, the hair rising on my arms and my mind expanding with the realisation that everything I had heard until then had not surpassed this, and nothing ever would.
I leave the record shop with my finds, set one on the platter, lower the arm, and my hearing comes alive, following the groove like a diamond threading its way through the channels of my mind.
The ringing in my ears vanishes and I can hear the upper reaches of that violin. The low growl of the Fender Stratocaster evokes rapture rather than distress. The crackle of the record between songs is a tranquil interlude.
Perhaps playing music this way, as I did when I was young, reignites the part of my brain that first absorbed the sound. Perhaps it is simply another form of compensation, the brain trying to make sense of what is missing.
I can’t be sure. But for 20 minutes or so, I can hear properly again.