Today is a beautiful day. I lie on the cliff edge as the sun sits on the horizon, its rays bounce on the waves and ripples in my eyes. The heat still simmers but it is punctuated by a cool breeze emanating from the horizon. I feel at ease as my skin is cleansed from the heat of the day and awashed with the coolness of the night.
I close my eyes and feel the silence, it envelopes me peacefully. I have a smile on my face, because I am content. I think it’s catching because one by one, the stars are coming out fighting against the afternoon sun. Some metres along the cliff edge, there is a couple, who I have never met before, with the moodiest faces in the area. As I glance their lips, I caught their conversation:
“Why have we come here? You can’t hear yourself think.”
“The traffic will go, love.” He was trying to be bothered.
“And the bloody seagulls.”
Just at that moment, a nearby car alarm went off. It was the last straw. They just upped and walked as if they were running away from an invisible monster, looking over their shoulders for the next swipe of sound.
It’s true. It was the afternoon traffic along the seafront with tempered drivers trying to get home for the weekend. Seagulls are notorious along the south coast and very popular in Brighton, they are always on the look out of a stray chip.
You will have to excuse me because I actually felt sorry for this couple. I was here living this wonderful moment in this glorious landscape, and they just couldn’t appreciate it like I do. They were trapped in a soundscape that alters their reality. It can turn such beautiful things into something rather unpleasant.
You see, I remember. I used to wear hearing aids. I remember the sounds invading my head and tickling my ear drum somewhere on the threshold of tolerable and intolerable. The sounds have a dreadful tendency to cause headaches that felt like the morning after a bad night. Hearing aids make you drunk with sound. It can be addictive because the slowly dying batteries make you want to search your pockets, drawers or handbags for the stray replacement, or make the guilty rush to a chemist.
I am one of those people who have detoxed themselves from hearing aids. Sometimes I feel a twinge of longing to try a pair and hear a bit of noise, a tune or the final of X Factor. But I remind myself that guilty pleasures will only cause problems later on. The ear infections and tinnitus (ringing noises from the head) are the worst.
I look at hearing people who live in the soundscape from a very young age. I don’t think they realise just how much sound rules their lives. There are some unwanted sounds, such as unshakeable tunes, the annoying muzak and rumble from a projector. If one is trying to work, they would either put up with it moodily or angrily switch it off. There is nearly always emotional response to the offending sound.
Sound is also a social inhibitor. I noticed in one train carriage, 60% were listening to an iPod like device. Their eyes are open but they are not looking, all the senses are turned off as they escape into an alternative reality. Sometimes they share, one might offer an ear bud to another (not very hygienic) and bring someone into their reality.
People are quite hopeless at managing sound. In a meeting room with the air conditioning humming and pneumatic drill roaring outside; no one complains. When my interpreter finally says something about it, you can see the shame in my hearing colleagues’ eyes: “they know I was not listening.” One might feel the need to fill the silence with sound but they are not obliged to listen.
The social rules of sound are difficult to understand. Whenever I say something in a public place, there are always two reactions: ‘shush’ or ‘speak up’. It always happens in a restaurant and I never seem to get it right to a tee. When I find the right volume, I try to maintain level until everyone decide to leave the room without me knowing, and the trick of ‘shush’ and ‘speak up’ starts again. I look bewildered at the craziness of the soundscape, it is a game, surely.
Hearing people know these rules, they are not written down because they are culturally bound. It depends on your ethnicity, class or the environment. Bodily sounds such as burps, slurps and yums are particularly notorious – the reactions can depend on who you are with. The general advice is try to avoid it if you can. Yumming is particularly hard because you lose focus when you are enjoying your food. It is a cat and mouse game, when you are nearly always the mouse.
Beware of sounds that happen at night. If you happen to live with a hearing person, please do expect disturbed sleep or interrupted evenings. Hearing people tend to jump, walk about for no reason and start a ‘sound hunt’. It is done with a Homo Erectus level of ferocity. They don’t stop until they get their kill, the source of the sound.
Hearing people make very clever use of sound. They know how to butt into a conversation as they edge in with an ummm or an ahhh. They play with the pitch of their voices to make their contributions acceptable, low for seriousness and high for playfullness. Some hearing people are not very good at this game at all and it separates out the alphas from the betas.
I understand that hearing people want me to enter their world, they want me to hear. But what they don’t realise is that it is not hearing that is the point, they want me to enter the game; the soundscape. As a sign language user, I am out of the game and considered an anomaly but if I am in the game, they can decide where I am in the pecking order.
This experience makes me even more convinced that hearingness and deafness is not a medically constructed reality, it is a socially constructed one. One might give as much sound as one can but it doesn’t resolve the social complexity of how people reacts to, manages and plays with it. No machine, ingenious or otherwise, will achieve this level of complexity, because humanity is simply brilliant.
So I look at the arguing couple walk away from the cliff edge, and let them get on with it. I look at the gulls soaring through the sky like white tailed aeroplanes and the cars move gracefully along the road in a polite queue, and the twinkling flashes from the white stars to the orange car alarms. It is amazing how the natural and man-made mirror each other. It is just a shame how they sound.
