I have been trying to listen to music in my bad ear. (CIST it’s called). It’s very strange. Hard to describe what I’m hearing.
For the last week or two, whenever I listen to a new song, it takes me 20 seconds to work out what song I’m listening to!
It’s not just that some frequencies are missing, my brain can’t actually decipher the music. It just sounds like a warbling chaotic mess. I can hear the rhythm of the drums, but I can’t even hear which drums were being hit.
I can’t hear singing, I can’t hear guitar, I can’t hear piano. It all comes as a random wall of warbling tones.
The first thing my ear can focus in on in a song is bass guitar or the beat of the drums.
Interesting is that songs that I learnt in my teenage years like U2, and Cold Chisel and Stryper were the first songs that I could recognise, so I’ve made a playlist of 80s music for my brain to be able to understand what I’m listening to.
The other really interesting thing is I have been listening to sine waves just to see which frequencies are good and bad, and in my bad ear actually hears the wrong frequency of the sign wave by 10 to 20 Hz. Sometimes more!!!
If I play 2 kHz pure tone into my right ear first I actually hear it maybe at 2050 hz or something. Enough that when I then play the same sinewave into my left ear, it sounds like a different pitch, but then if I play it in my left ear first, and then, in my right here, my right here hears the proper pitch.
It makes me realise how much of our high brain processing power is needed to understand sound, there’s so much going on!!!
Another interesting thing thing is, my brain can very easily latch onto rock music, but it’s very hard to hear something pure like a piano.
CIST and SSHL 