Not all sounds are ear sounds. Some sounds are beyond ears, like head sounds. These sounds are known as tinnitus, and probably everybody experiences them at one time (as do our animal friends). You may temporarily hear a “ringing in your ears” after being exposed to triple forte rock music. These are just the “phantom frequencies” that are dying inside your brain, never to be heard again. Or you may be like me, and experience Chronic Tinnitus―a mildly annoying to deafeningly debilitating condition. Some sufferers have even cut off their own ears in the hopes of exorcising the sound. Of course, head sounds need to be decapitated. There have even been reports of objective tinnitus―nerve noise so loud that it can be heard outside of the head in which it is produced.
Luckily, my own tinnitus is quiet enough that it only annoys me. Besides, these days there’s so much external noise around to mute our inner music, that I doubt anyone would mind a boy with an audible mind.
Now, before you start thinking that I drummed my ears into oblivion playing in rowdy rowdy rock bands for too long, I’ve always had this tinnitus, and it’s always the same sustained nerve note―a high-pitched D. Check it out!
Annoying right? Like a cricket. Long after my aging ears can no longer detect this frequency, it’ll still be in my head.
Under careful auscultation, my tinnitus is composed of a tsunami of sine waves. The root is a distant D tone, as if sounding over the cerebral horizon, backed by an ugly Ives chord of insect spectrals, coming in jerky crescendos. Underneath it all, the blanketed bass drumming of my heart kicks out of time.
Oh tinnitus―fated fermata―prepared by the Great Conductor, who with downbeat baton, denotes the ictus of death. Will it resolve on the one? Or slowly decay into black noise.
The openings empty out their last sound. From every mountaintop, let tinnitus ring.
