I’ve suffered from tinnitus now for about seven years.

I’m also a big, big music lover. I am actively seeking out new music and bands all the time. Not only do I have an insatiable desire for music but I have got hooked on reproducing music, to try and get it sounding as realistic as possible.

Hence my audio electronics, my building of kits and speakers, my search for the audio truth (within a certain budget of course).

So, you might wonder how tinnitus and music get on with one another. It’s not an easy combination for me.

My ears ring constantly, the left more so than the right. I should point out that while it is there all the time, it’s not so intrusive that I cannot work and live normally, most of the time I actually forget about it, because with normal background noise and attention on other things it does get pushed into the background.

The worst time is when I’m tired, the ringing can become really unbearable because it’s so intrusive. Also I really miss absolute silence. And, silence is really what you need when trying to listen to music.

The other thing is that the tinnitus makes the sound distort; high frequencies are especially bad. It often means I need to wear an ear plug in my left ear. When I go to see gigs I sometimes use both ear plugs, sometimes just the left one, depending on the volume. Same for the cinema.

However there is some salvation in the form of alcohol. Drinking a bottle of beer really helps the ringing enormously—drinking two bottles is even better! The alcohol really dulls the ringing, taking the nasty high frequency edge right off it and leaving me to listen to the music in (relative) peace.

The result is a bottle or two of beer makes for a much better listening session. Red wine doesn’t seem to have the same effect, you might be interested to know. And more than two bottles of beer doesn’t remove any more of the effects of the tinnitus, it just makes it harder to put the needle on the record!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 3:35 pm and is filed under General, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.