Composing (my) hearing: some reflections

Andrew Hugill, September 2020

Looking back on some 50 years of composing music I have slowly come to a realisation. What has prompted this is the serious decline in my hearing as a result of Ménière’s Disease (quick summary: severe to profound unbalanced hearing loss, fluctuating tinnitus and diplacusis). The Aural Diversity project has further made me think about the many different ways in which people hear. 

Since launching that project, I have attempted to recreate what I actually hear by building a new instrument, the diplacusis piano. As has so often been the case in my compositional career, what excited me about this project was the sense that I was doing something new. As far as I know, nobody has ever tried to have others hear hearing in this way. And certainly nobody else has explored my hearing in this way, because it is unique to me.

But…and this is the Big Realisation…it has now dawned on me that in fact I have always  been composing about my own hearing! This is not just a natural by-product of the fact that I am a hearing being and so writing music inevitably reflects that. Oh no. It goes much deeper than that. Let me explain…

All my life, I have heard in what I now recognise as a peculiar way. I think this is why I got into music-making in the first place. Of course, I did not know my way of hearing was peculiar. I just assumed that everyone heard the same way as I did. This is a feature of my kind of autism (“Asperger’s”, although we don’t use that term any more): you have these sensory experiences but you do not necessarily recognise that they are different from other people’s until later – in my case, 60 years later.

I hesitate to use the word “hyperacusis” to describe my hearing, because that is medically quite a precise term, but there is no doubt that I had an extreme sensitivity to sound from early childhood. I could hear things that others could not, such as electricity in wires, the drone of lightbulbs, and environmental sounds that people simply would not notice. What is more, these sounds were LOUD! I can remember being puzzled in aural tests when asked to recognise a common chord and hearing the lightbulbs mixed in with the piano overtones, creating a complicated spectrum that was really hard to unpick. 

I could hear the details in very complicated material. No wonder my favourite pieces as a teenager were things like Stockhausen’s ‘Gruppen’ for three orchestras. I really enjoyed the multiplicity of timbres and the chaotic swirl of their delivery. Boring old concordant music was dull by comparison. What I used to do was to zoom in on the detail. This was something I practiced not just when listening to music, but all the time. I used to transcribe busy roads, or sit with my head in a fridge listening to the humming and buzzing, or hear every individual bird in the dawn chorus. This was normal for me. 

The challenge was to be selective. It became apparent that other people wanted me to focus on specific sounds. So, for example, when playing the piano, I was supposed to listen only to the sounds made when I pressed the keys and not to all the other sounds that were happening at the same time. It was quite an effort to filter out everything else. Doing so gave me a kind of hyperfocus and I think that is where my composing began: making sounds that were deliberate and separated from the acoustic flow of the soundscape. 

This inner focus on detail was absorbing and profoundly affecting. I would lose myself in it, even in the imagination. I found (and this was at the age of 11) that I finally had a way to bypass some of the social and other sensory challenges I was experiencing and enjoy some stimuli over which I had control. (I could digress into synaesthesia here too, but I’ll save that for another post).

Now, when I look back, I can see that this very process has been written into many of my compositions. As a student, I wrote a piece called The ‘Endless Knot’ for a fairly large instrumental ensemble. This included a part for a varispeed tape recorder which played a loop that emitted a mysterious continuous sound. The tape speed and volume were gradually raised through the piece, so becoming higher in pitch and more intrusive. Another student piece was some settings of poems by C. P. Cavafy. In the final song, the soprano was instructed to wear headphones through which was played, very loudly, some music by Harry Partch. She then had to sing my composition using only her autophony (hearing the sound in her own head) and not being distracted by the Partch. 

In more mature work, the Catalogue de grenouilles presents a frog chorus whose intrusiveness (and fabulous detail) threatens to overwhelm an ensemble of human musicians. Similarly, in Pianolith the piano combines with the grinding rocks, the piano remaining immobile while the rocks rotate around the space. So the “musical” sounds are intruded upon, or in this case, equally balanced by, the “non-musical” sounds. I could describe many other works in a similar way, from Island Symphony to Bachelor Machine, from Doublemain to The Imaginary Voyage.

So, after my hearing loss, the hearing remains the same but is diminished and confused by the diplacusis, the tinnitus, and the partial deafness. My composition has suffered as a result, going through a hiatus period in the years immediately following the Ménière’s diagnosis, but gradually picking up again as I become accustomed to the strange new way in which I hear. The detail is still there, the focus, the intrusion of sounds from a variety of sources, but they are all distorted in some way. This is the subject of Thirty Minutes, for example.

It has taken a very long time for this realisation to arrive, but now it seems so obvious. In many ways, I am glad to have survived this long so that I can observe it! I have often found in composition that you only really understand what you have done years later. I don’t think this is the only subject of my music – my work is quite varied and rich in terms of its inspiration and thinking. But I do think it is an under-appreciated aspect and one which would never have occurred to me without Ménière’s.