[tt] Diary of a Cochlear Cyborg by Frank Forman, update of 8.8.17
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Diary of a Cochlear Cyborg by Frank Forman, update of 8.8.17
This is a running diary of an operation that gave me an artificial ear and
of my relearning how to hear. What makes my case different is that I am a
keen lover of classical music and am self-experimenting on struggling to
relearn how to hear music speech and vice versa.
For those of you getting the whole diary, and not just the update, first
will be the update, then comes a general introduction and the diary in
chronological order.
Excuse the typos, esp. after the current batch. I'm writing all this in a
file, and the spell checker insists on running through the whole document
in a seemingly random fashion, which by now is quite time consuming. When
I'm doing an e-mail it goes from top to bottom, which is very fast. "Don't
ask me why. Go ask your pop," says Dr. Seuss in one of his books I have
heard over and over again.
Upshot for the first year, in comparison with before the operation: better
in hearing people in person or watching teevee, though I can't really say
by how much, worse on the Fone, and much worse with music. I studiously do
hearing exercises for an hour a day. It can be up to two years before the
effects of training cease to matter. A year to go, then.
Upshot for the first year and a half: improvements still but I have a
sense they are slowing down.
Sarah is my wife. Andrea Marlowe is my audiologist at Johns Hopkins. Greg
Frane is a fellow graduate of the University of Virginia who came up from
his office for ten minutes and helps me go through some exercises every
day at work during the first several months. It was my right ear that was
operated on. Sharon Hamilton is a Mencken scholar and now teaches courses
at George Washington University and Georgetown University, on such topics
as Shakespeare, creative writing and some things she makes up, like the
Harlem Renaissance in literature. She came down with her husband, who
works in the Canadian Embassy, for three years on rotation. (Earlier, they
had rotated to Italy.) She loves the opportunity to see D.C.'s great
museums and to have a charming (well, at least knowledgable) guide through
them. Frances Moran is a lawyer at the Department of Education and one of
the very, very few who are right-of-center politically.
=====
Monday 2008 April 21
Sound and Beyond:
First, a few remarks I failed to put in earlier:
On April 8, I heard ice cream among the foods for the first time in quite
a while. I did get Martin Luther King Day this time.
On April 9, I also heard the fog horn for the first time in quite a while.
This one has always been easy!
On April 15, ice is NOT a food. I've tempted the subway officials many
times by carrying a cup of ice onto the trains. The sign says "No food or
liquids." Ice is not a food, since it contains no calories. Nor is it a
liquid, since it is a solid. So far, I've never been stopped. Anyway, I
got the item right on the test.
On April 17, I missed crowd roar vs. rain. They sound very close. I also
missed paternal vs. eternal. And this was in the family words module. I
must have been thinking of Dostoyevsky's short story, "The Eternal
Husband." I also decided not to restart the programs, while before I
would, thinking my brain was tuned into the wrong module, when I missed
the first question. This is cheating, in a way. No more! I might sometimes
restarted when I simply missed too many questions. Yet when I restarted, I
kept on missing a lot of them anyhow. So cheating is not helpful.
Round 53 began today, any my score was lower on every module with levels,
except the last (Everyday Sentences), where I tied. There's quite a bit of
fluctuation from day to day.
Tuesday 2008 April 22
Sound and Beyond: A new high of 24/25 for family words and a perfect
score, for the first time, for time words. Hooray!
Wednesday and Thursday 2008 April 23-4
Sound and Beyond: Round 54: A new high of 23/25 food words, a jump from
the earlier high of 20. I did get then all, but only after looking at the
choices. Another hooray!
Friday 2008 April 25
We had lunch again with Cowper Smith and his wife, Cary, as we did last
year on July 13. It was most pleasant, though I didn't hear him very well.
Afterwards, Sarah and I went to the cemetery where Alice is buried to
check a drawing of her proposed gravestone against other gravestones. We
agreed the design was fine. Her gravestone will record her being a civil
engineer, which is what she felt the most proud about. I wondered whether
a symbol for engineers should be added to the gravestone. Sarah thought
not, and looking around the cemetery, we did not find other such signs,
not even for Masons, Elks, or the like. So we decided that occupational
signs were just not the custom. In fact, occupations themselves were
rarely inscribed on the gravestones, except for Government Issued stones
for free for those who served in the military, as Sarah's father did. I'm
not sure he felt that his service in World War II was the most significant
thing he ever did, but he certainly liked telling war stories. These times
are so memorable, since one lives crowded together as one did in the Old
Stone Age. It's just that whenever one can afford it, one usually moves
into private quarters. There's just not enough human contact. Thus those
who didn't serve in the military often find their college days, squeezed
into dorms the most memorable part of their lives. Indeed, just about
every month, some grateful alumnus who has done well by himself fondly
remembers those days and gives $100 million to dear old alma mater. This
is so, even though the evidence that what one learns by going to class is
actually helpful in earning a living is slight in the extreme.
Sunday 2008 April 27
Keyboard: A terrible disappointment! I listened through my old hearing aid
receiver out of my meat ear and found the results awful. I just didn't
hear the scales properly. The lowest octave sounded extremely low, far
more than it would have before my operation. My brain, in adjusting to my
cyber ear is messing up what I am hearing in my meat ear. I've known for
sometime now that this is true of my attempts to hear music in my meat ear
alone, but this was shocking. I despair *ever* getting back in tune with
the imperishable truths of Beethoven, but I shall continue to persist.
Getting in tune is terribly important to me, yet I wonder what to do about
it.
Monday 2008 April 28
Sound and Beyond: Round 55: I forget on just what day I finally thought to
average my scores on the modules with levels, but from now on, I'll just
add up the percentages on each of the six modules and divide by six. This
is better than noting specific modules and give me an idea of how well I
am doing from round to round. My score was 79 percent. The best score,
since I made my last changes of levels, was 82%, on March 5.
Tuesday 2008 April 29
Sound and Beyond: I had already started counting the total number missed
(out of 184) of the modules without levels. Remember, starting October 4,
I try only once, make a guess, and don't count it was correct even if the
correct answer is obvious when I see the choices. I missed 87 of the 184
on that date and a terrible 128 on November 27. I was down to a mere 31 on
April 14. Today I missed 51 out of 184.
Wednesday 2008 April 30
Sound and Beyond Round 56: I'm hearing bass notes much better suddenly,
though I went from 92% to 80% in Environmental Sounds. I made up for it in
the other modules, and my score across the six modules with levels was
79%, unchanged from last time. I missed shell vs. shaw and win vs. when.
Thursday 2008 May 1
Sound and Beyond, modules without levels. A nice improvement: 37 misses
out of 184, compared to 51 last time.
I took Sharon to the Hirshhorn modern art museum, taking along with me two
books that chronicled various art "movements." The first book, Robert
Atkins, _Art Spoke_ (1993), covers 55 movements from 1848 to 1944, while
the second, _Art Speak_ (1990), covers 58 movements from 1946 to 1989.
My theory is that there were indeed "schools" before, such as that
describing 17th century Dutch paintings, in which the paintings there are
characteristic of their time and place and look alike. Art "movements," on
the other hand, are self-conscious creations, replete with manifestoes
proclaiming principle of what art *must* be.
The neo-classicists were perhaps the first of these self-conscious styles,
deliberately trying to revive classical antiquity. (No forgeries but
rather ideas here.) Think Jacques Louis David, whose painting of Napoleon
is one of the glories of the National Gallery of Art. Think also Jean
Antoine Houdon, by far my favorite sculptor. This period spanned
1760-1830. But the first movement to write manifestoes was that of a
secret society called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This was British and
went from 1848-1854 mostly. Think Dante Gabriel Rossetti (born in London
in 1828 of emigre Italian parents). This group "made a primitivizing
attempt to go back before the illusionistic approach perfected by the 16th
century Italian painter, Raphael. It's the Impressionists who really go
going with their writings. The term was coined in 1874 by a staunch
critic, but the Impressionists took it up with pride (just like the
Methodists and Quakers). They include Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe
Morisot (my favorite lady painter, in whom I seem to be alone in detecting
the sort of deliberate ambiguity that enlivens Cézanne), Camille Pissaro
(vastly overrated, if you ask me), Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and the
lone American, Mary Cassatt, whose paintings I have been severely
over-exposed to and no longer much appreciate. The greatest of all
painters, Paul Cézanne was a "Post-Impressionist." I have read many times
and been told in person the distinction between an Impressionist and a
Post-Impressionist, but for the life of me I simply can't keep the
distinction in my long-term memory.
So I sat down with Sharon as we walked through what few paintings from the
permanent collection were then on display and we read one or two page
descriptions of several movements. This was quite rewarding for both of us
indeed, but I've never seen or heard of anyone else just taking books like
these with them when visiting a modern art museum.
It is highly significant that there would be as many movements from
1946-1989 as from the entire century before. What's happened since is not
just the proliferation of new movements but paintings that are described
as eclectic mixtures of themes from several earlier movements. Is this a
dead end? I often think so!
Saturday 2008 May 3
We went to an open house at the German Embassy. This has long been one of
my favorite buildings in the D.C. area. We got to wander all over the
place. Such lively people there, too! It was uplifting.
Sunday 2008 May 4
Jogging: Trying to preserve my knees so I can continue to go jogging into
my really old age, I usually jogg through Norwood Park, which whose north
end is behind the buildings across the street from our apartment. (If
there are supernatural forces, they smile upon me. Not only is there
Sarah, of course, and a job across the street from the greatest block on
this vale of tears, namely the National Mall, but now a convenient
grassland to go jogging on. Or, less supernaturally, the good coincidences
in my life are a result of probability space being "curved" in such a way
that there are more than the expected number of coincidences. It is a
thought I am not competent to develop.
There were 4000 women, in quite good shape, absolutely by comparison with
highest percentage of lard buckets in any Federal agency I've ever been in
(namely the U.S. Department of Education, where I work) and strongly
relatively with the lard buckets that appear each Spring on the Mall)
encamped in the park! They were participating in the annual Avon Walk for
Breast Cancer, which started in Norwood Park this year. How clean the
grounds were! (I spoke to some of the volunteers and suggested that the
cleanliness was due to their being women. A man said, "I was about to say
that.") They were just leaving to head downtown. Their backpacks were
being loaded onto trucks that would meet up with them. I ran past them
(all were walking and none running, which surprised me. There was about
one man in twenty.) for a while and the backtracked and chatted a bit more
with the volunteers. There was a portable shower, which hooked into a fire
hydrant for water and an overhead line for electricity, the first I had
ever seen.
I was getting near the end of listening to my Brahms chamber music tapes,
this time with the fabulously mellow clarinet sonatas (Leopold Wlach on
Westminster, my all-time favorite clarinet player. He makes what I call
the swan song to Western civilization, namely the clarinet quintet sound
devastating. Alas, the Vienna Konzerthaus Quartet is just not as good as
the Lener, which brings out the agitatedness of the music like no other
performance I know. It is the first electric recording, with Charles
Draper, clarinetist, while very good lacks Wlach's depth. Well, the music
came in pretty well, but I was rather distracted inspecting female
pulchritude and so the greater beauty of Brahms did not sink in.
My hearing has gotten to the point that I resumed buying CDs, this time of
the most masculine of all pianists, Wilhelm Backhaus, in the Beethoven
sonatas. It had been reissued a couple of years ago in Europe. I waited in
vain for its release stateside and finally ordered and received it. To my
disappointment, it was the stereo remake, not the superior monophonic LP
version, which was the first recording after Artur Schnabel on 78s.
(Actually, Backhaus did not live long enough to re-record the
Hammerklavier, so it was the mono that was in the set.) This set has the
best appreciation of a performer, on four pages in the notes. I really,
really want to be able to fully hear these performances and to observe
attentively what the reviewer highlights. These reissues rarely bother
with discussing the music. The best set of notes on the music was written
by Robert Silverman in his most thoughtful and analytic recordings of the
New Testament of music, the Old Testament being the 48 of Bach. (Who said
that?)
Gould: I played the non-Gould items straight, this time using the actual
piano instead of the midis, as I had done two weeks before (And which I
failed to report. I have already played Gould himself on the Goulds,
showing such an improvement that I was willing to do so.) In the remaining
time, I did some more practicing.
Monday 2008 May 5
Sound and Beyond round 57: I think I'm getting into the swing of telling
high vs. low female and high vs. low male. (I rarely get the gender
wrong.) I went from 54% to 67%, though my high was 71% on March 26 (all at
level 3). I tied for 96% for the pure tones and had a new high of 92% for
everyday sentences. Overall average, though, was down from 79% to 78%.
I wandered into the annual Government Employee Recognition Week on the
Mall, while I planned to go to the art museum and continue working my way
through the permanent collection again, which is far more rewarding than
going to one blockbuster exhibition or another, since I get to trace out
the *evolution* of Western painting. I forgot to take along my external
mike and didn't hear very well. I spent only half an hour in the civilian
tent but an hour and a half in the military tent. I found out that land
mines cost as little as $3 a piece, which is why there are 80 million of
them around the globe. Most are in third world countries and the former
Yugoslavia. No one really knew why none have been planted in the United
States. IF you know where they are, it costs only a dollar to dig them
out, safely. The exhibitor showed me some of the tools that are used. I
thought it would be a horribly risky occupation to dig for these, which
generally are buried just below the surface, but this is not so.
I wasn't able to see a rifle similar to the one that was supposed to have
been used to shoot Kennedy, but I did hold in my hands an infamous AK-47.
The sell for $20 in the third world. I can own one, provided it is only a
semi-automatic (which means you have to squeeze the trigger for each
shot). It was during the Roosevelt II regime that a Federal gun control
law was passed forbidding fully automatics. The AK-47 I held was fully
automatic, though I certainly couldn't tell myself. I froogled
(http://froogle.google.com) for one and couldn't find one for less than
$250. No bargains if you buy them in bulk.
One exhibitor told me that civilians could get satellite maps that showed
features only as small as a meter across. I asked her what was available
to the military, and she told me that this was classified information. Did
she know herself. She denied it. Since the private businesses put up their
own satellites and can certainly buy good cameras, what prevented them
from taking more accurate pictures? She really didn't know. Yet on a
previous visit, I learned that satellites can read the numbers on license
plates (when they are flat on the ground, of course.) Some things are just
not all that secret!
Tuesday, 2008 May 6
Sound and Beyond: I missed 5/18 of the musical instruments, the worst
since October. Nothing to be too terribly alarmed about, these
fluctuations.
Wednesday, 2008 May 7
Sound and Beyond: Round 58: My computer is quite noisy! So I got only 72%
of the pure tones, tied for the lowest at level 4/5. But I hit my best
(96%) just two days ago. It hit the lowest on the consonants (level 3/3)
at 56% correct, but I got every single "everyday sentence" and this at the
top level, too!
Good training, given the racket generated by my computer. I have no idea
whether this noise can be picked up only by my equipment. I do know that
my meatear hearing aids would sometimes hum when near fluorescent light.
I'll have to go fetch someone when my computer is noisy and have her
listen over loudspeakers. Actually, I could do this myself.
I figured that it would be a good thing to summarize the daily results by
noting the percentage gotten correctly, as far as the modules that come in
levels go. There are a different number of questions in each module, and
that varies too by level. So it's an average, that is
(72+76+56+76+56+100)/6 = 73%. If I go up a level, the number correct goes
down (mutatis mutandis for going down a level). Last change was in March,
and my modules-with-levels score has ranged from 73% to 82%. So this is
the worst, but there was all this racket.
Art Gallery: Edouard Manet (1832-83). He was a pre-Impressionist and all
the more worthwhile, since Impressionism grew out of him, as he was quite
a rebel himself. It's fabulous that he was born only eight years before
Claude Monet (1840-1926), now my favorite
Impressionist/"Post"-Impressionist, after Cézanne. I often will join in in
case someone or another is conducting a tour.
Thursday, 2008 May 8
Sound and Beyond: I'm summarizing modules without levels by simply
counting up the number missed out of 184. It was in October that I stopped
looking at the choices before I guessed. I was getting them nearly all
right when I did and couldn't get any more training unless I made life
difficult for myself. I started out by missing 87/184 or 47% of them. My
worst came in November, when I missed 105.
It is good to look at the modules without levels (made difficult) this
way, as there has been very real improvement, while noting particular
modules shows a lot of fluctuation. Today's misses? Just 32, my best (31)
having come in the previous month.
Monday, 2008 May 12
Sound and Beyond: Round 59: Nothing exciting. There was a big noise
problem, which I somehow managed to correct. Got 77% of these modules with
levels correctly, up from 73% last time.
Tuesday, 2008 May 13
Sound and Beyond without levels: Went down from 83% to 74%, but I did get
all 16 Familiar Melodies right.
An improvement, 77% vs. 73% last time, even though it was noisy.
Wednesday, 2008 May 14
CRASHED: I was jogging into work and stumbled face first onto the
sidewalk. It happened so suddenly that I didn't brace myself. In the past
when I fall down, I just pick myself up and continue jogging. This time I
waited maybe half a minute. A lens popped out of my left eyeglass and I
put it back in. I'd just continue till my scheduled four miles were up and
check with the nurse, Tamara, at work. Continuing, I noticed that my visor
had fallen off, so I just backtracked down to when I fell down. I didn't
find it and, since I can get on the subway in several places there wasn't
any real need to continue to the stop I would have otherwise. I didn't
find the visor and decided to run still further to Booie Monger, a fast
food place that was open and had a bathroom, so that I could check the
damage. I was in a mess, with blood flowing both out of where my left
eyebrow is and a place up and to the right a quarter of an inch. My lens
fell out again, and I got down on the floor of the bathroom and looked for
it. At this point, I was rather distressed and went out and asked someone
to help me. The first man ignored me completely. The second came over to
the bathroom but would not enter. The other two entered and left after ten
seconds. And New Yorkers are the ones famous for their rudeness!
So I went back on track and did find my visor. By running up a side street
and down, I finished my four miles and boarded the subway. I actually ran
faster than I would have otherwise! When I got to work, the nurse sponged
off the blood, washed me, and called Kaiser and said come over to their
emergency clinic. Did I need an ambulance. No, I said I could run over. I
had plenty of energy. So up to my office to change clothes and take the
subway over, not an ambulance. The nurse came up and said Kaiser said I
should go to the emergency room at George Washington University, which is
near Kaiser anyhow.
I waited four hours, cheerfully complaining and pointing out that the
Danish Fone Company in 1904 began using the mathematics of probability to
determine how many Fone lines were needed to insure that calls would
usually get through, most of the time. (Forget Mother's Day and
Christmas!) Usual means 95% of the time or whatever figure one wants. This
math is called queuing theory. The fact is that the length of waiting
lines follow a well-known probability distribution, called the Poisson.
(The normal distribution (the "bell curve") is the best known probability
distribution and is centered in the middle, unlike the Poisson.) Now the
math can get complex, as math tends to do, but the basic idea is to
balance the price of added Fone lines (it would take a line for every pair
of Fones to guarantee no one would ever have to wait) against what the
users might be willing to pay for. It does take a while for ideas to
diffuse. Recall from your studies in archaeology that innovations spread
very slowly in the old days and that whole cultures can be dated by the
pots being used (Google for "Bell Beaker Culture" and "Corded Ware
Culture,") I don't know whether the folks back then were sullen and
hostile people as such, but language wasn't as elaborate back then and one
could not give complex arguments in favor of one's ideas. It was Europeans
who were the first to become really receptive to change, though after Bell
Beaker and Corded Ware days (which were in Europe: my knowledge of
non-European archaeology is much less than my rudimentary knowledge of
European.) For one, individualism, as a matter of temperament, was much
more widespread than in India and the Far East. For another, capitalism
gives one far greater incentives to fight for one's ideas. Still, it took
until the Italian Renaissance to accomplish what Goethe called one of the
great achievements of the human mind, double entry bookkeeping, and until
the 1920s for Alfred P. Sloan at General Motors to adopt so simple an idea
as inventory control. These do not go back to the days of Nebuchadnezzar,
Ashurbanipal, and Tiglath Piliser III. When I was growing up, I wondered
why wastebaskets weren't made the same size and (paper) grocery bags and
why there wasn't one long waiting line at the bank rather than having
customers go to a line of his choice and hope that he wasn't standing in
front of someone with a lot of business to do. (It was instantly obvious
to me that the extra time spent walking from the line to the teller was
more than worth it.)
Anyway, I finally did get my wounds stitched up. I was rather cheerful and
when done I asked the young physician's assistant whether she took extra
care with me because I was nice, and she said yes. She didn't think the
scars would be esp. noticeable.
I got back to work at 6:00, with one-half hour to go on my flexday
schedule, which is 8:00 to 6:30 four days a week. Hearing: I brought in my
extension mike and heard most everyone pretty well.
Will hospitals adopt queueing theory? If they think patient time is worth
zero, as they seem to, no. My stitcher confirmed my thought that if it
happened that there were too many healers and that sometimes no one was
there to get healed, she'd simply catch up on paperwork. There's a kind of
negative moral attitude of superiority on the part of health care people,
most likely highest in male physicians, at work that may be operative
here, along with the usual slowness of ideas to diffuse.
It does not help that health care is heavily regulated by governments at
all levels (which pays for about half of it in this country) either. (But
so are Fones.) Even so, when Alice died, her boss proudly showed us the
diligent survey she had conducted of every major piece of equipment in the
paper mill. It gave considerable details about how each machine could
break down and how often. After I got back, I wrote to him and suggested
that a replacement for Alice, which would be difficult, since she was
quite a self-starter, as witnessed by this survey, might be not another
chemical engineer but rather someone who knew queueing theory. I told him
I googled a number of business sites <"poisson distribution"
site:www.ibm.com> and similar and found only a few academic-like papers on
one site. I tried a bunch of other things, too. Mead WestVaco, where she
worked, could start a revolution, like Sloan did with inventory control.
With the distributions at hand and some cost data, the plant could build
in redundancies by having spare machines around at the most economical
points, just like the Fone companies decide on how many redundant lines to
install, since of course only a fraction of the total capacity ever gets
used (except for Mother's Day and Christmas: I realize that this does not
describe today's Fone networks, as I am just illustrating an idea).
He ignored my e-mail. Maybe because I think like the economist I am, while
he thinks like an engineer. I think I said earlier in this diary that my
ideal of an ideal education (mostly for the gifted, alas) would be to
induct one into thinking like economists and engineers and lawyers and
physicians and others in semester long introductions in high school. Kick
out math beyond a single semester to make room for these worldview
courses. I was a math major and enjoyed it hugely, so I am speaking
*against* interest. I submitted, as a private citizen, a long set of
"Questions for the National Mathematics Advisory Panel," which you can get
by googling the title, among which was to ask what mathematical thinking
was and what it was good for. Thanks to a confederate and secret
sympathizer, this essay was included in the briefing books for the panel
before one of their earlier meetings, so it was quite well brought to
their attention. After the panel issued its final report (which I found
disappointingly insubstantial), the head of the panel, Larry Faulkner,
gave a talk at work. I asked him that question, adding that it was a
difficult one. He gave a longer answer to that than to any other question,
evidently not thinking it was a hostile one, but I couldn't hear much of
the answer. Others told me that he just gave a few examples but did not
penetrate to its essence. My thought is that, since hardly anyone uses
math besides some scientists, a really good teacher could distill the math
down to helping one think like a mathematician to a semester.
As far as is apparent, no one thought to take my questions seriously, not
in their professional capacity, though others I sent it to loved them. No
one, but no one, caught that my whole list of questions was a parody of
the most important and influential work in _____ of all time. I won't give
away what it was, so you may test your general education for yourself.
Well, my being ignored may have to do with the fact that diffusion of
ideas is only comparatively less in the West, that Premise Checking is
hard work (though I delight in it), that there's is no reward for
proposing anything that deviated by more than 3% from the consensus of
experts (and while the Math Panel's report said algebra was the crucial
thing, no one suggested chucking geometry, though over time this might
happen, considering that trigonometry and solid geometry are hardly taught
anywhere anymore, though one standard twelfth grade math only a couple of
generations ago). Or it could be my own personality. This has undoubtedly
been shaped by my being undersocialized as a result of my hearing. It
could just be me and a certain stubbornness in my character. I do
sometimes resolve to play the game and not Check too many Premises, but
rarely for long.
Thursday, 2008 May 15
As I had expected, the emotional reaction to my accident hit me in force
the next day. So I stayed home. I e-mailed my sub-boss, boss, and
superboss about my mishap and that I might not come in and would be
delayed on Monday, as I would go in early to get my stitches removed.
Friday, 2008 May 15
My flexday. When I crashed I hurt my knees, so I decided to go for a
four-mile walk instead of a four-mile jogg. You'll recall that I did no
running between operation and activation. I wrote "Run! Run! Glorious
Run!" in my diary after I resumed. In fact, it seems every few years, I
manage to have to do rapid walking instead of jogging.
Monday, 2008 May 19
I waited less than an hour to get my stitches removed. I should my scars
to those who I had told about the accident, but absolutely no one noticed
it!
Sound and Beyond Round 60, with levels, down 77% to 76%, insignificant. I
also did the modules without levels. Up from 74% to 79%. Once again, I got
all 16 Familiar Melodies right. I'm getting no useful training from this
module. So, for the first time since I got the software on July 17 last
year, I am going to drop one of the fourteen modules.
Tuesday, 2008 May 20
Sound and Beyond Round 61, with levels. Up from 76% to 78%, insignificant,
though I tied for high on pure tones, 96%, and got a new high on vowels,
92%. I confused windstorm and rain on environmental sounds, but they sure
sound almost the same to me!
Wednesday, 2008 May 21
Sound and Beyond, without levels. Held steady at 79%
Thursday, 2008 May 22
Sound and Beyond Round 62: With levels, I got my worst since I last
changed the difficulty in a module back in on March 3 (round 41) . Only
72% right. I got only 44% of the high female, low female, high male, and
low male right. Since I usually mistake a male and a female once or twice
out of fifty questions, this means *worse* than chance. Actually, I only
got 40% right the first time, but I was up to 71% on March 26. I am
continually bedeviled by this exercise! So it must be providing good
training. The question is whether there will be gradual, though not
perfectly steady, improvement.
Thursday, 2008 May 29
I was on vacation, but I lost the sheet on which I jotted down what had
been happening with regard to my hearing. I just stayed home and don't
think we went anyplace or say anybody. I did continue to drill each day on
music exercises.
Sound and Beyond, without levels: A new overall record, missing 63 out of
168. This is not much of a record, since I'm counting only since I dropped
Familiar Melodies last time. I did get all 25 time questions right. I did
this only once before, since I made these modules without levels difficult
by not looking at the choices before guessing (which I did back on October
4, round 17, last year) and that was on round 53, April 21).
For anyone combing this diary for consistency, I am giving the dates when
I *start* a round. I've become more proficient and take only two hours to
run through the modules, while earlier on it can have been up to three
hours. I'm absolutely positive there are other inconsistencies, but I do
try fairly vigorously to get everything right. I don't mean my opinions on
all sort of things will be the same as yours, of course! And also, I don't
write down what happened that day at the end of every day, my any means.
I'm getting worse at this, as it is now July 27 as I type this from my
notes. In fact, I'm going to give the Sound and Beyond accounts for both
with and without levels on the first day of the two.
Monday, 2008 June 2
Sound and Beyond, round 63: 77% correct with levels, 79% without, for an
average of 78%. Since March, I've ranged from 75% to 80% since March. It
was nice to hear ice cream among the food items thrice, since I always get
this one!
Wednesday, 2008 June 4
Did I report that I decided to listen to Gould's Beethoven when out
jogging? I've reported on listening to Schnabel, Backhaus, Kempff (all
mono), and Silverman's Beethoven sonata cycles. Hans von Bülow iirc said
the Old Testament of music was the 48 preludes and fugues of Bach's
Well-Tempered Clavier and the New Testament was the 32 piano sonatas of
Beethoven. (I forget who said the three Bs are Bach, Beethoven, and
Brahms, except that he didn't say it. He thought they were Bach,
Beethoven, and Berlioz. I love Berlioz greatly, even though he never wrote
any chamber music. The other Bs are Bruckner and Bartok, bringing them up
to six.) Now I would hardly say these sonatas are the 32 greatest works of
music of all time, but they do constitute the top testament of one man's
life's journey, or most of it, as Beethoven did have a few more years to
live after he composed his last sonata. I am hardly alone in thinking that
his late quartets, all composed after his last sonata are the finest
achievements in music, and indeed of all art. Only two others have
achieved a comparable reaching beyond the human condition: Nietzsche and
Cézanne. I may take a break in my abandonment of reality project and
inter-splice Nietzsche. I should also do so with the Bible.
I discovered that I hear Gould's playing more cleanly than that of anyone
else, and so I have connected to the imperishable truths of music better
now than since before my operation. If I can just do this rather more
consistently, I will be able to report that my operation has not been an
utter failure. Nevertheless, I must report that I kept hearing confusedly
what was on the tape I was listening to, while in fact I had put on a
different tape. Such is the power of imagination or, less charitably put,
self-deceit. It could have just been a bad day. (I think "bad hair day"
has become an all-purpose meme.)
Sound and Beyond, Round 64: Consonants were way up from 66% last time to
84% this time, but I did my best on my very first trial at this (the top)
level, at 98%! Overall: with levels, 80%, without 77%, overall 79%, which
was insignificantly up from 78% last time.
I have long averaged a sum using "Pop Evans' Fifty Percent and Over Rule,
though some say round up if it will be an even number and round down if it
will be an odd number. My eighth grade arithmetic teacher, Frank B. Evans,
was right, since last numbers tend to appear in roughly the logarithms of
their appearance. (I forget the reason why, but it has something to do
with the fact that a series that stops somewhere randomly will have more
ones than anything else. Next frequent is 2, and so on. I just don't
remember why the proportions will be logarithmic, but it seems to be a
good empirical rule of thumb. There's a problem, though, how does one
round 0.49? If your calculator had been set to one digit beyond the
decimal point, you'd be seeing 0.5 and then might round it up to 1.
When I was in Pop Evans' class, I got so bored that I was misbehaving. He
gave me a ninth grade algebra book (not the one used in the high school in
the same building as the junior high but supposedly a better one) and told
me that when I got bored to just read the book. I did so with a relish. He
then gave me the 11th grade algebra book, and I did likewise. I scored
99th bzw. 77th percentiles on a national test and got to my surprise a
"Special Award for Superlative Achievement in the Field of Algebra" at our
junior high graduation.
Later, when I thought to look up my junior high school principal and
seventh grade English teacher, Bruce Sinclair, I was told that it was
actually his idea not Pop's. Thank you, Mr. Sinclair, now known to me as
Bruce. We have visited him several times on trips to Colorado Springs to
see Mom. It's amazing how full the life of a principal can be. It turns
out that he is even more conservative than I am. Actual experience, of
course. It's just that so few teachers learn from experience and tend to
be Democrats, though not nearly so much as their union leaders. The
National Teachers' Association is the biggest lobbying group in the
country, and they mouth egalitarian platitudes but, like all unions,
basically want "MORE!" I may go into my Public Choice analysis of the No
Child Left Behind Act later.
Sound and Beyond: Insignificant change.
Friday, 2008 June 6
I have given up on All My Children, which I have been watching for over a
year as a way of retraining my brain. This teevee program, like The Jim
Lehrer News Hour, features the camera shining on the speakers. I'm still
pretty hopeless in following speech when I can't read lips, and to get the
training, I avoid watching the captions (except when my favorites, like
Adam, are speaking). I had remarked several times that I didn't know which
is more ridiculous, All My Children, or the gasbags on The Jim Lehrer News
Hour. But All My Children has gone over the brink, with its invocation of
the supernatural in the person of Dixie. At first, I thought Dixie was
just one of Adam's hallucinations, which would make it fun. In fact, Dixie
does exhibit supernatural powers and appears to others as well, in
addition to making objects move by supernatural means. Besides, into this
program has crept an ever-increasing and now irritating number of minority
persons. I find it pointless.
Now, I am quite interested in the rest of the world and have read novels
by ten non-Westerners, since I abandoned reality on my sixtieth birthday
(on the grounds that I know, at least in outline form, pretty much what
biologists and social scientists know about the human condition and that
novelists have a way of getting at the human condition that eludes hard
and soft scientists alike). Here they are:
1. García Márquez, Gabriel, 1928- . One hundred years of solitude. 1967.
[Colombia]
2. Pamuk, Orhan, 1952- . Snow. 2002. [Turkey]
3. Truong, Monique, 1968- . The book of salt. 2003. [Viet Nam]
4. Mistry, Rohinton, 1952- . A fine balance. 1995. [India]
5. Muraski Shibuku, c. 973-c. 1014 or 1025. The Tale of Genji, part 1. By
1014 [Japan]
6. Achebe, Chinua, 1930- . Things fall apart. 1956 [Nigeria]
7. Jin, Ha, 1956- . Waiting. 1999. [China]
8. Mahfouz, Naguib, 1911-2006. The thief and the dogs, 1961, trans. 1984.
[Egypt]
9. Borges, Jorge Luis, 1899-1986. Complete fictions. [Argentina]
10. Pramoedya Anata Toer, 1925-2006. This earth of mankind. 1979. [Java]
Note that they are from ten different countries. Nos. 1, 2, 5, and 9
qualify as great literature, and the others (except No. 3) certainly held
my attention. I can't say I've learned all that much about the non-Western
mind, the reason being perhaps that the very form of the novel stuffs
writing into a Western mold.
I'll be missing the ritual of watching All My Children but not the
increasing irritation.
Here are links to recaps of the last two episodes I watched.
Daily Recaps Archives | 2008 | All My Children @ soapcentral.com in
http://www.soapcentral.com/amc/recaps/2008/080512.php
Daily Recaps Archives | 2008 | All My Children @ soapcentral.com in
http://www.soapcentral.com/amc/recaps/2008/080519.php
Monday, 2008 June 9
Sound and Beyond Round 65. Levels, down from 80% to 76%, no levels, down
from 77% to 74%. Overall, down from 79% to 75%. And 75% is my rock bottom
since March. I did as badly thrice before. Since my high is 80%, I'm
really dealing with a small range. I think there has been overall
improvement, though slight.
Wednesday, 2008 June 11
Sound and Beyond:
I did two little experiments on the modules with levels: I did them with
no second guesses (wondering whether my first judgment is the best and
repeating the test makes me have bad second thoughts) and I did them at
the very top level. Here's the results:
Module
Regular Exercise
No Second Guesses
Top Level
Pure Tones: 80, 80, 50. I didn't do worse without guessing. I was
surprised that I did so much worse when going from the fourth to the fifth
level, as the software often urges me to move up to the top, since I'm
doing so well.
Environmental Sounds: 80, --, 55. I didn't both with doing without second
guesses, since I rarely do so anyhow. I've been stuck at level 2 since
November last year.
Male/Female: 54, 55, --. Looks like it makes no difference whether I repeat
a word. I'm already at the top level.
Vowels: 74, 78, 45. I'd really have to run this little experiment more to
tell whether repeats matter. I moved from level 1 to level 2 only in March.
Consonants: 68, 53, 57. It seems that repeating does make a difference. I
moved to level 3 in March also.
Everyday Sentences: 96, 46, --. Not repeating makes a very huge
difference. You hear a sentence with a terrific amount of racket in the
background and must choose one of four sentences. If it seems that the
first time the sentence is not the top one (it makes no difference which
one I concentrate on), then I try to figure out which of the other three
it might be. So I'll listen carefully and then try to figure out which of
the remaining ones it might be. And finally, I'll listen to the last one.
Now if I think I do hear the sentence, when I listen to it being read
again, I'll look at another sentence. If the one I thought it was comes in
loud and clear, I'm in good stead. But so often I'm still confused.
Indeed, the first sentence might be the one that was actually spoken, but
I'll still flub it. This is great training, indeed. (I'm already at the
top level.)
I missed the heart beat among environmental sounds, which is amazing, but
the racket from my computer is huge. I find that I not merely have to
restart Windows but actually unplug my machine to get rid of it. I've
asked visitors whether they hear anything when I turn on my loud speaker,
but they say no. It only comes over my sound processor. I wish I knew to
whom I might mention this. (It doesn't happen on my computer at home, but
we've got bad ones at work. We're using Windows 2000, believe it or not,
and the amount of RAM is tiny by today's standards. On top of this, being
on a network slows things down hugely also. I learned that having the
Google Toolbar means that everything must go through "security." No, there
was no announcement of this bogus "security" matter. It's just that the
repairman--and I've gotten to know quite a number of them pretty
well--told me about it. He has no idea what the rationale for this
"security" measure is. It is sometimes hard to take my work seriously if
Management doesn't to the extent of shelling out a bare fraction of my
annual salary to get us decent computers. And, no, "security" prevents me
from shelling out a few dollars to buy better RAM chips and installing
them myself. This is stupid. Later, I may explain why the U.S. Department
of Education is the stupidest in the entire Federal Government. Well, one
of them has to be, and there I am.
Thursday, 2008 June 10
Sound and Beyond: Test 8 Here's the whole trend line, over nearly a year:
Tone: Pure Tones (pick the odd one out of three)
Envi: Environmental Sounds (lawn sprinkler, snowboard, and 100 others: pick
one out of four)
M/F: Male/Female (pick the odd sex out of three)
Vowel: Pick one word out of 48 displayed, differing by a single vowel.
Consonant: ditto
Sent: Everyday Sentences: Pick one out of four. I've done so well on this
that I didn't even bother with it and just gave myself 100% for averaging
purposes.
Date Tone Envi M/F Vowe Cons Sent AVERAGE (%)
1 0717 ALL #44 #52 # 8 # 5 #96|51
2 0830 93 n52 #52 n26 n18 ALL|57
3 0926 93 n56 n90 n30 n28 ALL|66
4 1030 #89 n76 90 n38 n35 ALL|73
5 0110 97 *80 ALL 33 n43 ALL|76
6 0303 83 t80 92 33 40 ALL|71
7 0409 93 72 92 35 38 ALL|72
8 0612 93 64 all *43 *48 ---|75
I didn't reach my all time high, which was back in January. Overall, I
fear I'm stuck in the 70s. I'll keep plugging away till two years after
Activation Day.
Art Gallery: I mostly looked at paintings of Edgar Degas (1834-1917) as I
continue to what I find the most rewarding experience on the Mall, namely
the permanent collection at the National Gallery of Art. I get to trace
out the evolution of Western painting, which is how I approach the world.
I do go to most of the blockbusters, and some of them are exceedingly
worthwhile. Lately, though, I've been hurrying through the ones that I
find I do not appreciate very much and can't become able to do so.
Thursday, 2008 June 19.
Sound and Beyond for the (work) week (June 16-9): Rounds 66 and 67:
Round w levels w/o average (all %)
65 76 74 75 66 79 77 78
67 80 77 79
I didn't note anything interesting about these, except maybe that I tied
for a high of 96% on environmental sounds on Monday and likewise for pure
tones on Wednesday.
Monday, 2008 June 23
Sound and Beyond: Round 68: Commuter quite noisy. Stopped after a reboot,
though that didn't improve my scores. In fact they got worse, but that's
just normal variation.
Art Museum: Nothing regards my hearing. I did get back to the most
rewarding, in the long run, of my trips to the museums, namely the
permanent collection. I continued to view 19th century French painting,
this time the two I think I like the least, one being Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), whom I dislike because of the ugliness of
the people he paints in a dance hall called Moulin Rouge. Maybe he is a
good painter of the ugly and should be accepted on those terms. But I saw
an exhibit of his whole career and, though I often find much more merit in
an artist by seeing his *evolution* as he struggles with his subjects
(this very much happened with van Gogh), not so with him. The other is
Camille Pissaro (1830-1903). The question comes up, asked famously by Otto
Weininger, in Sex and Character, whether the Jew can be creative. He
thought not, that the Jew is like woman in this regard. Weininger was
himself Jewish and committed suicide. His book haunted a whole generation
of Jews, most esp. Wittgenstein. The best biography of him is by Ray Monk,
Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. The title is exact, that Wittgenstein
was driven by Weininger to prove his creativity. There's a whole book of
essays, called Wittgenstein and Weinigner, or maybe the reverse, which I
have read with much interest. Well, is Pissaro a Jew who is not, in the
end, creative but just an imitator? (Wittgenstein was clearly creative, no
doubt in my mind about that, but Freud was a fraud. Essentialist
statements like Weininger's fly against the universe of chance that
Darwin, more than anyone else, helped open.) I couldn't make my mind. Then
I read that Cézanne thought highly of him. Maybe I was prejudiced. Later,
surely by accident, a rotating collection of fifty or so 19th century
paintings are on display in the East Wing, called "Small French
Paintings," just happened to have Pissaro at different years of his life,
together with paintings by others painted around the same time. And this
was true of many other painters. What I observed is that painters do more
than just get skilled. They also absorb themselves in contemporary
developments. They join new schools. Is this creativity or imitation? One
mustn't hold the man who is by far the most important Jewish Impressionist
to a different set of standards. But what I also noticed was that painters
stopped assimilating into emerging styles as they reach a certain age,
with one exception: Pissaro. Later still, as the magnificent Cézanne
exhibit I went to nineteen times two years ago, I kept reading over and
over specific things Cézanne learned from Pissaro. Today, I don't so much
care about this issue of creativity, whether the Jew is "like woman."
Rather, what I object to is that Pissarro's painting are quite skillful
but they lack that ultimate necessity for art, SWEAT on the part of the
artist. This is a moral objection, and it is what I have against Mozart.
At least until the 39th Symphony, where he at last broke away from the
patronage system and started composing for himself. Lots of hack work
during his final year or so, but a new direction. The 39th is his most
enigmatic work (with Schubert it's his 15th quartet, with Beethoven his
13th with die große Fuge or maybe the 28th sonata). Then Symphonies 40 and
41, the clarinet concerto and quintet, the 27th piano concerto, the Magic
Flute, and the Requiem. Still, Mozart is one of the dozen greatest
composers. The amazing thing about music is that if you took out the top
twenty, music would not be the premiere Western art form. This is not true
at all of painting and literature. Anyway, today I'm down on Pissaro both
because he didn't sweat and for his ultimate lack of creativity. My
favorite Jewish painter? I'll have to think about it. One of the stereo
Vox Boxes of Mendelssohn's chamber music wrestled with this question of
whether a Jewish composer could be creative and suggested that to see
Mendelssohn's music as only facile was to be an anti-semite. I can sort of
see (hear!) the charge. What is striking about Mendelssohn is that he
really didn't get better and better. His violin concerto is one of his
last works (he died at age 41 iirc), but it would take a specialist to
tell this. Mahler is unquestionably creative and very much a sweating
genius, so the question is not whether the Jew is like woman, but a
population question.
Tuesday, 2008 June 24
Sound and Beyond: Quiet computer, but I nevertheless missed 11 food items,
my worst since May 20. But I missed only 3 color items, my second best
since April, and tied for only one wrong family item, the best I've ever
done (since I stopped looking at the choices before hand). So despite my
missing 11 food items, I did the best overall on the modules without
levels since May 20, missing 32/168. I missed five number items, but I may
do better, since it has occurred to me to concentrate on the second
syllable of thirty, forty, and eighty, which I often miss (I mean all the
30s, 40s, and 80s.) This is what training is all about! Well, it was only
5/25 misses. When I start getting them all several times in a row, I'll
cease to gain any further training and so will stop. I've done this only
for familiar melodies in all the time I've had this software, which I
started using July 17 last year.
Wednesday, 2008 June 25
Sound and Beyond Round 69: 76% with levels.
Thursday, 2008 June 26
Sound and Beyond: Fine news indeed! New records on three modules. I missed
only 2/25 in Food, Colors, and Numbers, and 19/168 of all these modules
without levels. This is 89% right. A new record by a wide margin, my
previous one being 32 misses, which was set on Tuesday. And I did my best
on any round so far, namely 83% right. I did get 80% right back in April,
the only time I've broken into the 80s. I'm eager to see whether I break
into the 80s on my next test.
Tuesday, 2008 July 1 (at work only Wednesday this week)
I have been derelict in adding daily to my diary and have misplaced a
piece of paper upon which I jotted notes about things to talk about. The
most significant happening since I last sent out an installment is the
one-man experiment on music. Here's a letter I just sent to my
audiologist, with a copy to the head of the otology department at NIH:
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 11:06:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: Premise Checker <checker at panix.com>
To: Andrea Marlowe <andrea at TheListeningCenter.com>
Cc: Glenn Carle <GSCarle at comcast.net>
Subject: Recovering My Ability to Listen to Music
If you are still following my diary, you know about how my implant has
distorted my ability to listen to music. The scale does not subjectively
rise. Sometimes note fall when in fact they rise. Sometimes I hear chords
rather than a single note. I realize that my operation was a risky one and
that I should continue with exercises for up to two years after
activation. My ability to follow speech has indeed improved, at least when
I can read the speaker's lips. My ability to hear otherwise, such as over
the phone, is not at good as it was before my implant. But it's my ability
to listen to music that has gone way down.
Now my exercises consist, half the time, of going through the modules in
the excellent Sound and Beyond software. I have dropped only one module,
identifying "familiar tunes," since I make correct identifications nearly
all the time, For half of them I have made them purposely more difficult
by not looking at the choices ahead of time (otherwise, I'd get them all
right). So I still spend an hour a day on them. Other than these, I used
to watch two hour-long teevee shows each Friday in which the camera
focused on the speakers: The Jim Lehrer New Hour and All My Children. This
show has greatly deteriorated, and so I watch Lehrer only. In addition, I
engage in three hour-long exercises for music. One is to play just the
scales or tunes like "The Star-Spangled Banner" and various hymn I know
well from my childhood. I also use software called iSong which allows me
to hear movements of classical music, either as played by the pianist
(Glenn Gould on six Bach works and an anonymous pianist on six others) or
as midi files, where I can chose either left or right hand or both, vary
the speed at will, and play stripped down versions that are intended as
practice exercises. In both cases, I play close attention and tell myself
"Hey, the music is rising (or falling as is the case)! Tell your brain
about this. Try to make it sound like, not the chord or the wrong note my
brain is hearing but the one the score says it is!
My third exercise is with software call "Singing Coach." There's a
microphone into which I try to sing correctly the music as it rolls by on
my screen. I'm at the beginner level, and if I'm within a half note of the
correct note, I'm graded accordingly. (At intermediate and advanced
levels, I must be with in a quarter or an eighth note. I'm not nearly
ready for these levels.) When the exercise is over, I am graded by the
percent of time I'm within half a note. My voice wobbles often a very
great deal, sometimes much more than other times, and it is a struggle to
even get one note correctly, let alone to go along with the whole tune.
There are easy, intermediate, and challenging tunes. "The Star-Spangled
Banner" is a "challenging" tune, but this I know exceedingly well and do
comparatively well, esp. when I slow it down as much as I can. This tune
spans an octave and a half, but I can manage it. (Sarah can cover two and
a half octaves!)
I can also sing single notes or one note followed by another. I have
managed many times to hit and hold a single note 100% of the time or close
to it. But my ability to sing one note and then another one 1,2,...,8
(octave) higher or lower is sometimes awful sometimes pretty good (at
least at the beginner level). As I've reported so often in my diary, there
is a tremendous amount of day-to-day and even minute-to-minute
variability. Singing Coach does record best efforts, but only for the
songs. There's no track record like there is in Sound and Beyond in which
I can tell if there are long-term improvements. With teevee, Glenn Gould,
and the keyboard there is nothing objective.
All in all, I am loyally spending an hour a day doing one exercise or
another. The terrible thing is that my brain distorts my subjective
interpretations of the music that comes in for both my cyberear and my
meatear. I wish that I could hear music, poorly in my meatear due to the
damage in my hair cells, but correctly as far as the scale goes and
continue to glory in the imperishable truths of Beethoven. Generally, when
I listen to music at home or out jogging, I use a cord I have soldered
together that allows stereophonic listening. The left channel goes into a
body aid receiver and custom mold into my cyber ear, while the right
channel goes into an attenuating patch cord into my analog-to-digital
sound processor and thence up to the transmitter and to the receiver in my
head that allowed me to call myself a cochlear cyborg. (Lots of tedious
work getting these chords with frail wires to work, but worse is the fact
that my stereo amplifier generates a high pitches noise, often quite loud.
I've solved that problem by using a little amplifier that runs with
batteries alone. Even plugging the amplifier into an AC-DC adapter
generates a racket. This does not happen over the phone or in my amplifier
at work. Must be something peculiar to our apartment.)
Well, three weeks ago I failed to recharge the batteries to my processor
overnight. It ran out during my jogging, but I decided to listen as best
as I could with my meatear. (Now I told you that my strong impression is
that I heard more clearly in my right ear, provided I could make the sound
loud enough. I was mixed about which ear to operate on. Your test
instruments weren't refined enough to tell other than that I had an
overall greater loss in my right ear, and that was the one that was
operated on.) I decided to listen to music *only* with my meatear for a
while as a one-man experiment (sample size = 1!) in hopes that my brain
might recover the subjectively correct scale. And I'm doing the music
training (keyboard, iSong, and Singing Coach) with my meat ear, too.
I can only give a subjective report of what's happened over the past three
weeks but it seems to me that there may be some recovery but I just can't
tell. My diary reports ups and downs about music, either in stereo or
cyberear only, but with a general *subjective* sense of gradual
improvement. I can only let my one-man experiment roll on. Perhaps I could
stop listening to music altogether for a while. The most drastic thing I
could do would be to stop using my cyberear at all for a while and see if
the status quo ante returns! I am sure you would be horrified at the very
thought of this, though I do sometimes get desperate to hear music. Maybe
I could use the implant only to listen to actual conversations.
What I would like for you to do is discuss this with Dr. Limb and get his
observations. I'm eager to become a guinea pig for NIH or any other group
that might make use of my insights. A study with a big sample size would
be wonderful, but I doubt there are all that many cochlear cyborgs in the
area for this to be feasible. (What ever happened to the research study
"Cochlear Implant-Mediated Perception of Music. I googled and got a
website and sent an e-mail to the address you gave me,
soundlab123 at gmail.com, but never got any reply.)
Still, scientists learn from individual case studies, and I think I'm a
fairly articulate fellow. I'm copying this to Glenn Carle, a fellow we
used to see at the Y.M.C.A. who head the otology department at NIH and has
come to know Dr. Limb quite well. I await your and his replies.
My general feeling is that the rate of improvement has been slowing down.
The exercises are getting more and more tedious for me, and so your two-year
limit sounds about right. If, however, I become a guinea pig, then I might
just well continue with music exercises, esp. with new ones.
[END OF LETTER TO ANDREA]
Wednesday, 2008 July 2
Art Museum: I failed to take my external microphone with me, to my loss,
as there was one of those painters there who make copies of paintings in
the collection. I've never quite understood why they do this. Most are
rather shy, but this one expostulated on his work. Too bad I couldn't hear
him. I'll have to remember to always take my external mike with me. He
left calling cards, and his read:
Paul L DeRyke
30025 30th St.
Paw Paw, MI 49079
USA
Ph: 269-628-4221
Ph: 269-615-3143
paul l Deryke at netscape.com
WWW.KALAMZOOARTS.COM
Other side:
Copyist at
National Gallery of Art
Restorer of Art
Instructor of Arr for all ages
Artist of Oils ,Pastels, & Drawing
Accepting Commissions
Stained Glass
Sound and Beyond Round 70. 75% and 79% (next Monday) for the two halves.
Down from my all time high (since March) of 83%. This is sometimes called
mean regression, a phenomenon discovered by Charles Darwin's nephew,
Francis Galton, the great statistician and coiner of "eugenics." It is the
tendency of those in the child generation to go back toward (regress) to
the average of the parent generation. In other words, tall parents do
have, on the average of course, children who are taller than average but
less tall than they are. And short parents have children who are shorter
than the average but taller than they are. The surprising thing is that
mean regression works in the opposite direction. Tall children have
parents shorter than they are, and short children have parents who are
taller than they are.
This has lend many thinkers to say that mean regression is not real but
only statistical. I disagree with this but I don't know how to really
argue for it. I haven't searched the Web and its attics to find a good
discussion. Well, the one on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean seems to be a good
one. Perhaps the best argument for innate racial differences in
intelligence is that the offspring of White and black parents regress to
their respective population means. There can still be systematic effects
that lower the IQ of blacks, some due to the way black parents raise their
children, some due to the way Whites treat them, but it seems odd that
these effects would not be uniform (depressing the IQs of all blacks by
the same amount) but mimic what a genetic hypothesis would say. This is
redolent of the epicycles of Ptolemaic astronomy. Indeed the flat earth of
the Bible can be maintained even today by simply modifying physical laws
in just the right amounts. One Bible I have speaks of two times in
Genesis, man's time and God's time.
I won't take sides on the race issue but rather sit on the sidelines and
point out the arguments and let others decide for themselves. Likewise, I
won't take a stand on capital punishment or homosexual marriage. In these
cases, I just don't have the necessary facts. I can be against capital
punishment simply because I don't trust governments, and I can be for it
on the grounds that vengeance is a natural desire that is just as
important as other natural desires and, besides, capital punishment
reduces the murder rate. As for homosexual marriage, the case against is
that the whole purpose of marriage is to turn cads into dads and that any
distraction from this purpose weakens the institution. The case for is
that we are becoming more and more able to manipulate ourselves and our
genes. This is a good thing, and we must be tolerant of the weird things
that will be produced, like children who glow in the dark. We must also
expect mistakes along the way. Evolution does not strive for a goal but
rather supports great diversity. Homosexual marriages are small deviations
from normality compared to what will come, so if we tolerate or even
encourage these marriages, we'll be better disposed toward the
transhumanist modifications to come.
As I said, I don't have the facts about the actual strengths of these
arguments pro and con to decide. My decline in my score on Sound and
Beyond? Is this mean regression? I don't know. I hope not, that I have
indeed improved and that the decline is just a random fluke.
I missed hiss vs. hearse again.
Thursday, 2008 July 3
Jogging, using my meatear: pretty bad.
Keyboard: Miserable, miserable, miserable. I played the scale over and
over again, using my meatear. I pressed notes trying to hear the scale
subjectively. I'd do weird things like go up half-notes and, when I came
to the last two notes, I'd go well into the next octave. Yet when I tried
to descend by playing the notes in the reverse direction, I was not
successful. And sometimes I'd just try to make my brain hear the notes as
I know they should. And yet, and yet, when I switched to my cyberear, the
subjective results were much, much better, though not, of course,
perfectly, by any means.
So, I'm wondering whether my experiment using my meatear for music and my
cyberear for conversation is working.
Friday, 2008 July 4
I was crying as I went to be, fearing the worst for my ability to listen
to music. But, what you can't get out of your ears you can get out of your
brain. I awoke during the middle of the night, dreaming the glorious
opening strains of the Brahms Fourth! I used to be able, I think, I think,
to dream entire movements.
Jogging: again not good.
We spend the morning with Sarah's singing friend Phyllis Arner, but even
using my external mike, I heard poorly. I got her record player running,
for me a terribly simple thing to do. She asked me what to do with old LPs
and whether any were valuable. I said the best thing to do is to give them
to a library. If the wind up in a huge basement room in Silver Spring,
they will stay there for several months, giving those who love going to
these places many chances to buy them at cheap prices. If she gave them to
a book sale, they would be on view for only a few days. I don't know what
happens to them eventually. What I do know is that I collected first
paperback editions of Erle Stanley Gardner (I recall that 82/114 were
Perry Masons. I managed to assemble, cheaply, first paperbacks of most of
them. I've been hoping that some lawyer would give me $1000 for the lot,
so he could proudly display them in his office, next to the bound volumes
of more sober stuff. A great many lawyers found their calling from reading
the Masons. There are certainly lawyers out there who would pay this much
for them, as visiting used book shops over and over again is not something
most lawyers would be inclined to do. Alas, not only are used book shops
in steep decline, but I rarely see any Masons at all anymore and never
early printings. You can get them on Bookfinder no doubt, but this would
require many visits and often stiff prices, like $20 per Mason if not
more. The fun is in the quest, but still many a lawyer, I am convinced,
would love to get the lot. It's just that *finding* him is so difficult!
And so it is with Phyllis's LPs. Used record dealers are also dying
out--Dave Canfield and Les Gerber have quit--but they will only take discs
that they can turn around and sell for $12 or more. And they will pay at
most 25% of the resell value, more like 10%. Irvington Records, however,
is still around, and it will accept LPs on commission. It keeps 40%, but
you price individually. (If you don't, it's 10-25% of what they can
expect. I've been collecting long enough to have a good idea of used
(classical!) records might bring. I quickly told Phyllis that most of hers
are not worth bothering to resell, no matter how much enjoyment she got
from them. We have in common Nicholas Harnoncourt's first recording of the
b Mass, which is my favorite of the work: swift and moving. Uses boy's
choirs. The remake with mixed voices is just not as good, though it was
the one Telefunken chose for its "complete" Bach Edition.
I knew there was some possible value in some children's music done by Karl
Orff that were issued only on German labels, since interest in this
country is minimal. Canfield's Guide said about $10 each. I told her that
this music has undoubtedly made it to CD, since making CDs has become so
much cheaper that there are at least ten times the number of different
classical CDs as there ever were of LPs. However, the number of those who
even have a record player are few and generally older (she is about twenty
years older than Sarah, but not even she can play 78s. Only heavy-duty
collectors can). Younger ones that do have an interest in this aspect of
Orff will have bought the music on CD. When I got home I checked the big
Muse catalog. Sure enough the music is available on CD, but I didn't take
down the details of her records so can't say whether the performances are
the same.
Saturday, 2008 July 5
Exercise: Hooray! I heard Gould's Bach pretty well out of my meatear. Not
that the scale was anything like right, but I did hear the notes pretty
distinctly. I've been having a recurrence of having tunes rattle along
with the music, and this has been worse than usual. Today, it is better. I
don't know when I'll be going back to listening to music with both ears.
Sunday, 2008 July 6
Jogging: While listening (meatear) to a Bach cello sonata on my Gould
tapes, and being able to identify the cello groaning on (I can barely
detect a violin in the violin sonatas), it occurred to me that I might try
listening to the unaccompanied cello suites (Casals) when enjoying a pipe.
This afternoon I didn't hear very well, but this evening went better.
However, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" kept going through my brain.
Persist, I say.
Gould: I'm listening with my meatear and playing the Bach very, very
slowly, one hand at a time. For the most part, I do hear the music rising
when the score says it should, but I certainly can't identify intervals.
And the lower notes will sound way, way too low. There's a certain sour
tone about them a lot, too. (I previously noted a sour-sounding Mozart
Fantasy in c, K. 457 (Gianoli) some months ago.
I wrote on March 12, "On the way home, I hears a most sour Fantasy in c,
K. 475. The reason for not recognizing Sonata 11, it turned out, was
simply that I had played the wrong side of the tape!"
Hmmm. After sneaking in some cyberear, I find that the way, way too low
bass notes sound at most way too low, even after I've turned off the
cyberear. This is the effect of practicing for just an hour, but I doubt
it will carry over permanently, at least not to the next session but
(here's hoping!) over several months.
Monday, 2008 July 7
Art Museum: Spent an hour with the gallery's splendid collection of
paintings by Claude Monet (1840-1926). I think he may be my favorite
Impressionist/Post-Impressionist after Cézanne, pushing out Renoir. Rather
crowded. I like to spend at least two minutes in front of every painting,
and sometimes I speak to other visitors and tell them to do likewise. I
spent much longer in front of the most fascinating painting in the room of
Monets, The Japanese Footbridge (1899). This painting is as much about
painting and how it effects the eye and brain as about the footbridge (it
was in his garden at his home in Giverny in France) itself. So you get
intrigued not just by the reflections of the lily ponds in the water but
how the painter made these reflections look like reflections *and* like
painterly tricks. During those five minutes at least three visitors parked
themselves by the side of this painting and had a friend photograph them
and the painting! Hearing? I was trying to concentrate on the paintings
rather than the tourists, so I didn't hear much.
Tuesday, 2008 July 8
Sound and Beyond Round 71: I went back up again. No surprise. I missed,
though, quite a few voiced vs. voiceless consonants, like b vs p and t vs
d, which should be very easy.
Greg came up to find out how I was doing. We went through the spondaic
words (two syllable words, equally accented, like doormat, airplane). I
got about 75% of them right from the full list of 32. I hadn't done these
exercises since November last year. I got 95% of them then, up from 80% in
May and just half in April. These words are no longer close to my
short-term memory, so I'm not sure whether I should be upset. I expressed
happiness to Greg, but it is just now (August 15) that I searched my diary
for my past performances. They are, after all, pretty objective or at
least constant across time. Not even Sound and Beyond really is constant.
There are varying levels of racket in my computer at work and also a huge
variability in my ability to concentrate, to retrieve words from my
mid-term memory (if there is such a thing), my tiredness, my degree of
interest, and oftentimes my impatience to finish up and go home.
Sharon and I went to a restaurant we had gone to before on Capitol Hill,
which again had no jukebox and few other patrons. So we just talked for a
few hours. It's rare that people do this. Even when I'm with Sarah we are
often going from one place to another and get distracted by what we see.
Even in a restaurant, we can get distracted by the process of deciding
what to eat and then by the food itself. Sarah is not high up in her
interest in eating but it's not the 16th of Steven Reiss's 16 Basic
Desires, as it is for me and, I think, of Sharon. Of course, the sort of
intimate talk, non-verbal signaling, and touching among lovers wasn't
possible. Sharon is quite happily married anyhow. My hearing, esp. inside
the restaurant, was excellent. I asked her about her darkest secrets. She
doesn't have any, except that she may be given to envy more than she ought
to. I told her that one night I poured out to Sarah everything I had
regretted doing that I had never told her about. She listened without
interruption but didn't think my misactions were any big deal. (The next
day I poured out everything I had forgotten to tell her that night.) I was
a tremendous relief to me. (I can't remember them all now, and they
include lying, cheating, and stealing. But the worst thing I did, or
rather what has grated on me the most, was to do what my mom got me to do,
namely to offer in the fourth or fifth grade a cookie to anyone who voted
for me for some class officer position or other.)
We also engaged in another futile discussion on religion. The best part
was her going over Shakespeare's 23rd Sonnet with me. This is an unusually
hard one to understand, and I took along not only Helen Vendler's _The Art
of Shakespeare's Sonnet's_, which Sharon commended to me and which gives
two to eight pages of analysis of each sonnet. In addition, I printed out
various analyses from the Web, including that from the Barnes and Noble
_No Fear_ series which gives the one or another early text in modern
spelling on one page and a modern translation on the other. All the
sonnets are on the Web, I think. She said why this analysis of Sonnet 23
wasn't very good.
Wednesday, 2008 July 9
George Mason annual reception for law and economics graduates. This has
always been worth going to. I was able to hear some people far better than
others. Made some contacts with a GMU graduate at the Heritage Foundation
and also a lawyer who specializes in Internet law. I spoke with him about
lingering copyright problems with 78s and will share my thoughts with him.
Sunday, 2008 July 13
Second anniversary of Alice's death. Started listening to Bob Silverman's
recordings of the Beethoven Sonatas. These provided a much needed
distraction in the wake of her suicide. I know the New Testament of music
as well as anything, in particular the first three recordings of the cycle
(Schnabel, Backhaus, and Kempff) but rather too well. What Bob's cycle,
which I can best describe as thoughtful, did was to distract me into a
different world, far from an unfamiliar world, but to become absorbed into
the particularities of his interpretation. While not displacing my all
time favorites, his cycle is definitely the fourth best one. It is a shame
that this Canadian pianist is so little known.
I have no new thoughts about Alice, except to report that her horrible
second husband, who drove her over the brink, quickly blew that $160,000
in life insurance on drugs and later wound up in jail. Drugs do that, but
he had exhibited a bad personality from his childhood. All her friends
warned her against him, to no avail.
Monday, 2008 July 14
Art Museum: Paul Gaugin (1848-1903) and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1990). I
spoke about Vince on June 23. No need to repeat. My understanding of
Gaugin went up considerable, thanks to the guides that the museum puts in
many of its galleries. His whole aim was "to express interior states
rather than surface appearances," in a movement more of "symbolist"
writers than painters, called "synthétisme, ordering sensory date and
simplifying it to its fundamentals." That indeed he did. I had no occasion
to listen to anyone, though.
Tuesday, 2008 July 15
Jogging in: I enjoyed the Beethoven sonatas so much I just listened to
them the rest of the way in, rather than reading more Shakespeare sonnets.
This has not happened to me for quite a while,even if I can't heard them
anything like correctly. I was as in tune with the transcendent more than
I have been, and this is terribly important to me.
Sound and Beyond Round 73: Unchanged at 79% correct.
Thursday, 2008 July 17
I got my life's first massage, free for about ten minutes. It felt good
but had no lasting effects whatsoever. My mother's father, who became rich
by performing one particular operation over and over again, would have a
masseuer come over regularly. I could never see indulging in such luxury.
I'd rather donate the money to something or another. But I was still
curious. Curiosity satisfied.
Sound and Beyond Round 74: Down to 76%, my worst since June 9 (75%). And I
did the worst since March on the modules with levels generally. Mixing up
m and n in the consonant test continues to plague me, and I got only 42%
of the male/females right, less than chance, but I don't think
significantly less than change, given my record of fluctuation.
Tuesday, 2008 July 22
Art Museum: At last, the final and greatest gallery on the main floor, the
permanent collection of European and American paintings. This gallery, of
course, contains paintings by Paul Cézanne. There were about thirty
visitors when I entered the room, as crowded for the main galleries
(though not the blockbusters) as I can ever remember.
Then came in 15 grade school children. I listened for a while. The teacher
was well-prepared, like having a flag of France, which produced after
telling the kids Cézanne came from France. That sort of thing. I decided
to just look at the picture.
OFF went my processor. This hour with Cézanne is for ME, and fergit about
training my ears!
Later the room had only four and then just me and a painter copying
"Harlequin" (1890, not one of my favorites). She said it would take her
ten hours to copy it, over several sessions. She also thought many
painters would slap many of their paintings together, unlike Cézanne. I
didn't hear her all that well. Most copyists at NGA are shy. There were 13
there when I left.
[Later: I could go on at length about other paintings there. During the
next three weeks I went to the bottom floor, whose northwest side is given
over mostly to sculpture and the minor arts, like coins, rugs, and
pottery. This is all of rather minor interest to me, even if one of the
regular tour guides warns us repeatedly not to look upon easel painting as
the entirety of visual art. Next week, I'll finish up. I should mentioned
a fine blockbuster, "In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and
Photographers from Corot to Monet." I think I can tell a major painter
from a minor one, since even his early paintings stands out. So I flatter
myself. After going through the exhibit and concentrating only on the
seventeen paintings singled out in the lecture you can rent (I just ask
for the transcript, since I can't hear) and noticed this difference
between painters who were to become major and those who were to remain
forever minor, I decided to go back and look at all the paintings without
looking at the name of the artist first. I didn't do as well as I had
thought but not all that badly either. One exception: I really liked the
paintings of Théodore Rousseau (no relation to other Rousseaus, the
painter Henri and the opera composer and author Jean-Jacques). He is
generally given the second rank.
The exhibition was about a place near Paris where many of the French
greats repaired. It later became the world's first national park, fifteen
years before Yellowstone. Its commercialization was noted by one critic,
whose name I don't know: "The landscape is something to be consumed. It's
consumed prior to arrival by the perusal of guidebooks and the reading of
newspaper articles about the forest. And when one arrives there, one is
processed through the forest in rather the same way that cargo is
processed through other parts of the industrial system. Nature can only be
marketed on this scale to a public who've lost all touch with nature in
the first place." This was written long before Marxism, cultural studies,
and postmodernism, making me wonder just what these three really
accomplish.
Photographs were interleaved with paintings, letting us think how one
influences the other. Why paint at all anymore? Some influence was quite
obvious: photographs get cropped and later on so did paintings. What I
have wondered about for quite a while is just how single point
perspective, invented during the Renaissance, differs from how the eye and
camera actually see. We take it for granted that single-point perspective
is a great advance over all previous art in depicting the world correctly.
Now I read that this is not so. Finally, one guide showed me Claude Monet
(1840-1926)'s early painting, "The Route to Chailly (Pavé de Chially)
(1865). (It is a fine painting but far from the masterpieces that he would
later paint.) She pointed me to a nearby photograph. In both there was an
avenue of trees of equal height receding into the distance. In the
painting, a line imagined over the tops of the trees was a simple falling
straight line. In the photograph, it was a curved line. Important question
answered!
Wednesday, 2008 July 23
Birthday celebration at my office. I used this for additional training,
and I think I have improved. Still, I rarely got whole sentences.
Sound and Beyond Round 75: I did the best since March (my last upgrading)
(83%) on the modules with levels. This is interesting enough to produce in
full. I tied for 96% correct of the pure tones (I missed 1/25) and jumped
up in three of the other four, but slid on Environmental Sounds. In no
other specific module, did I hit a record high or low. I went from the
worst to the best.
No. Date Tone Envi M/F Vowe Cons Sent| 74 0717 76 92 42 84 70
68|72#
75 0723 t96 84 65 88 78 88|83*
Thursday, 2008 July 24
Sound and Beyond: Modules without levels: Up from 80% to 81%, Total for
the round was 82%, one point off from the all-time high.
Monday, 2008 July 28
Sound and Beyond Round 76: Modules with levels, down from 83% to 80%. I
did get all the environmental sounds for the very first time since I
started over a year ago, even though I went from level 1 to level 2.
Tuesday, 2008 July 29.
1½ year check up with Andrea!
I did worse on the pure tone test in the higher frequencies. I told her I
thought it was because I didn't say I heard in ambiguous cases as much as
I have done before. Nevertheless, she re-boosted the high frequencies on
my processor. I did very much better on a short, informal spondaic word
test. Yes, she and my surgeon, Charles Limb, know all about my desire to
participate in studies for learning better to appreciate music. It's just
that there haven't been any, at least none nearby. And Advanced Bionics
has no current plans to put out an improved sound processor. Keep up your
training till two years have passed. I'm only really familiar with Sound
and Beyond but your other methods are all admirable and, as far as I know,
the best around. And do be sure to have the sound processor on unless you
are asleep. Unbeknownst to you, your brain is retraining to filter out
noise.
Wednesday, 2008 July 30
Sound and Beyond: Modules without levels, went down from 81% to 77%. After
the re-boost of the higher frequencies yesterday, a lot of the words
sounded strange, and I was pleased to get items right that I didn't hear
correctly. I am certainly not going to claim on the basis of today that
the re-boost was a mistake.
Thursday, 2008 July 31
Sharon and I went to the lecture described in this invitation I sent out
to several people where I work. It turned out to be exactly as I expected.
No one besides her showed up. Frances was indeed too busy, as she is
taking on the task of writing final regulation for something called the
Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. I got to know her, since the
unit that handles this moved right next to my office. The law is a tissue
of ambiguity, contradiction, and absurdities, more so than most Federal
laws. After Cho's massacre at Virginia Tech last year, the Bush
Administration asked that the regulations (regulation are done by the
executive branch to fill out often barebones law and to interpret what the
law says, since Congress can't put everything into every law in advance.
Way too many laws for one thing. For another, there are few people who
work for Congressmen as opposed to the executive branch) be revised. It
seems that college were using FERPA to avoid finding out about people like
Cho and warning the campus police and mental health people. They are too
afraid to be sued. Actually FERPA didn't prohibit this sort of preventive
action, but it would be good to say so more explicitly. Besides, so many
cases have come up that got more and more complex. Frances is one of the
few people there smart enough to keep the whole act and present
regulations in all their complexity in her head. (I can't. My brand of
intelligence is more to search for a larger problem, solve it, and then
apply to the given problem, Premise Checking, if you will.) The whole
thing has gotten out of control, esp. with a whole host of non-experts who
are given political jobs barking contradictory desires, and often over
small and insignificant things. Frances sometimes appears to be ready to
give up.
There will be a talk from 1:00-2:00 on Thursday, July 31, by Russell Sale,
who is my favorite lecturer at the National Gallery of Art. (It will start
in the lobby of the East Building.)
The subject is the exhibition, "Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the
National Museum, Kabul," and includes some 230 objects, dating from 2220
B.C. to 200 A.D. This will be of special interest to those of us involved
in international education, as Afghanistan was on the Silk Road, and
Russell will certainly tell us a lot on his specific objects were
identified as being which intercultural mixtures. I haven't been to one of
his talks since before my cochlear transplant. He is clear and precise
and, amazing to me, can learn and talk about a subject outside his
specialty (Renaissance art) for an hour without notes. AND he usually can
answer my questions, which, if you know my ability to ask them, says a
great deal.
I have already gone through the exhibition and found most fascinating of
all the glassware. Glass is a liquid, very slow moving but enough so that
glassware becomes cloudy over the millennia. Not so with some of the
objects on display here. The art is mostly what we call decorative, rather
than portrait or landscape painting, which is my own greatest love in the
visual arts. And so the archaeology of the objects, that is, how we know
what the object is, can be just as interesting as the objects themselves.
I'll be leaving at 12:45 from the northeast lobby of the Johnson building,
but you may join us in the East Wing as you wish. Tell your supervisor you
are going to get an educational experience. Better, bring him or her
along. Bring your friends, too.
[end of notice]
The others were all "too busy," or as mis-befits a department of
*education* of low intellectual curiosity. Hostility to ideas may be more
pervasive at the agency where I work than at any other government
bureaucracy. I suspect but can't verify.
Friday, 2008 August 1
Jim Lehrer: I turns out that, once again, I left the battery-powered
amplifier (designed to boost computer loudspeakers) on, and they were
drained down to 1.1 volts, all eight batteries. This negligence is getting
expensive. As I think I reported about the terrible noise problems I get
from my stereo at home, the only thing that works is to use this little
amplifier. And I can't even use an AC-DC transformer, since even that
generates a racket.
I tried listening simply through the teevee set's loudspeakers in the
normal way, but it was too noisy. It is simply far better to run the sound
through an amplifier. As a result, I didn't get to put fresh batteries
into the little amplifier (oh, I'm sure the sound quality is poor, by the
standards of those with normal hearing) until after a talk from some
experts on the suicide by a man about to be indicted for the anthrax
attacks shortly after the World Trade Center attacks. My strong suspicion
is that he is not guilty, and more that Hatfield was. I think it was done
by someone who wanted to rack up the hysteria after the WTC attacks even
further.
Saturday, 2008 August 2
Singing Coach: Not very good. Will give a chart later.
Sunday, 2008 August 3
Gould (on iSong): I played right and left hand alone for the French Suite
and the first mov. of the Moonschein Sonata and the Mozart Rondo alla
Turca (the last two non-Gould) very slowly, so as to train my ear to hear
whether notes rise or fell. In the last I did quite well, at least by my
standards. The only exception was in sometime not hearing octaves (A and
the next A, for example, followed by C and the next C) always rising.
Toward the end I did even that. Well, mostly. This is certainly an
improvement over a great many sessions!
Glenn Gould Edition: Did I say that I hear Glenn Gould and his crisp
articulation better than anyone else's and celebrated by buying the
remaining CDs of the Glenn Gould Edition on Sony that I didn't have. A few
more are scheduled to arrive, but I finished listening to what I have. So
back to the Casals recordings on 78s of the Beethoven Cello Sonatas. I had
listened to his recordings of the Bach Suites for Cello Alone, thinking
that maybe I would hear the low notes clearly. I didn't very well, though,
and I also don't like the music anywhere nearly as much as the Sonatas and
Partitas for Violin Alone, which is at the top of my favorite Bach, along
with the Goldberg Variations, and the Musical Offering. (I've gotten
burned out on the b Mass and the Art of the Fugue, and generally with his
non-abstract music. I'm really reporting on my evolving tastes before the
operation.)
Last year I only bought the 28th and 29th sonatas by Mitsuko Uchida. This
year it has been the Backhaus stereo remake of the Beethoven Sonatas and
the missing Glenn Gould Edition. (I had it all on LP but sold them to a
Canadian collector.) I just learned that the Reine Gianoli Mozart sonata
cycle on Westminster, which I have praised repeatedly as the one to get
when you've had an overdose of Gould, has at last been reissued on CD,
which I ordered, along with a 30-CD EMI set, Vaughan Williams Collector's
Edition. Maybe I'll get something out of it. It's cheap enough.
Monday, 2008 August 4
Jogging: I finished the Beethoven sonatas (Silverman) but I can't say I
heard much of the series' transcendent final movement. Actually, I think
the Hammerklavier is my favorite. It doesn't have the reaching beyond the
human condition the last three do, but it has a sense of inevitability the
last three don't. The 29th does attempt the impossible, to sound like an
orchestra, or so everyone who write about it says, but it is not so
transcendental of the human condition, which is what I see in Beethoven
more than anyone else. My opinion for the moment. Then came the theme and
first six Diabelli Variations, and those came it recognizably, though I
did lose track of where one ended and another began. I lose myself before
the operation, though.
Sound and Beyond Round 77: I went down on the modules with levels also,
from 80% to 77%. I'm not ready to claim that Andrea shouldn't have
re-boosted the high frequency response, esp. since that's what I need most
on these tests.
I explained to Frances Howard Bloom's invocation of Freud's "narcissism of
small differences." She said this was certainly true of what was going on
in her section. She took it will all good humor. I said think of it as a
game and told her how I could spend hours making sure an entry in a
discography I was working on would be exactly right, that I did so with
relish, not with despair. This cheered her up, and I can report that her
humor came back, even though she continues to feel overworked.
Tuesday, 2008 August 5
Sound and Beyond, modules without levels: Steady at 77% correct. For all
modules, down from 79% to 77%. No big reason to think that re-boosting the
high frequencies had a harmful effect.
Wednesday, 2008 August 6
Sound and Beyond Round 78: Up from 77% to 79% on modules with levels and
from 77% to 82% without levels. I got all 18 Instruments right for the
very first time since I stopped looking at the choices beforehand back in
October. If I can hold to this, I may very well be able to stop doing this
exercise, as I have with Familiar Melodies.
Sunday, 2008 August 10
Keyboard: Okay, sort of, when I started, but after a few minutes things
went bad. At the end, when pressing a single note, I started hearing notes
going up, but only for a while. I'd get patterns like +00+++0, +++-0++,
and ++--+o+, where + meaning a subjectively rising note, 0 staying the
same, - meaning a subjectively falling note. But I can't say that ++-
means one plus! This is not encouraging at all!
Tuesday, 2008 August 12
I was off on Monday to get a potential hernia on my right side examined by
Dr. George Gibeily, who performed a minor operation on my left side back
in 2002. Come back in four months. It is so minor it is not worth
operating on, most probably.
Sound and Beyond Round 79: Down two percentage points both for the modules
with and without levels. I got all 25 environmental sounds correct,
though, but missed one instrument. I missed hot dog among the foods, much
to my displeasure: I had simply forgotten that hot dog was among the
foods. I note that salmon is among the animals, foods, and color items.
Wednesday, 2008 August 13
Local 2607 General Membership Meeting, my first one for many months, since
either it was far away in another building or else I didn't get notice in
time. Even so, I was unable to secure a court reporter to transcribe the
proceedings onto a laptop. Nevertheless, by moving around I was able to
hear pretty well, though by no means well enough to capture the full
context. That has always been a problem. This time the proceedings were
quite polite, unlike the yelling (narcissism of small differences, again)
that had characterized many, many previous meetings. I was the only White
guy actually there, though there was another one from one of the
Department's regions that was virtually there. I couldn't make out
anything he said, though. Federal unions are, by law, quite powerless,
since they cannot strike (Coolidge, the best president of the last
century, got elected in large part because, when mayor of Boston, he
refused to countenance a police strike. Mr. Mencken summarized his
presidency: "He had no ideas and was not a nuisance.") Nevertheless, the
Union is allowed to negotiate over certain issues, and it's far from a bad
idea for a union to inform Management of things that concern the workers.
I mentioned that the biggest nuisance is having to use computers that have
tiny amounts of RAM and used an eight-year old operating system. I
surmised that I lose an hour a day waiting for my computer to do the
simplest things. It is sometimes hard to take my work seriously when
Management refuses to give us the tools to properly do our jobs. Yes, the
union does deal with these matters. I was also glad to see Ben Miller in
his finest form. He would have made a great orator.
Thursday, 2000 August 14
I have the root of a tooth extracted at 1:00 today. It's now 5:27 and I'm
feeling almost no pain. The oral surgeon used something better than
novocain, and it really was. I didn't fell much of anything. What happened
was that I had the crown of a decayed tooth fixed with a plastic part on
top of the natural crown and some pins holding the crown together. (A
tooth consists of the crown and the root underneath it.) I popped off the
crown by forcing the floss to go between the half-artificial tooth and my
natural teeth on both sides. I don't remember it happening but I noticed
that there was a funny feeling where the crown was. Many hours later, I
looked into a mirror. My dentist, James M. Buchanan, D.D.S., told me what
happened and said he wasn't an oral surgeon, that I'd have to get the
small remains of the crown and the whole root extracted, wait for healing
for a couple of weeks, and have him finish the job. (I discovered him when
in the Bethesda Medical Building, where my former hearing aid audiologist
works. I dropped by to tell him about *my* James M. Buchanan, and he said
he had indeed heard of his Nobel prize. Later on, we decided to switch our
dentist to one in Maryland, since Sarah thought the one we had for many,
many years in Virginia had retired. We went, once, to a dentist her friend
recommended, but his practice was about as mechanical as you could
imagine. I remembered James Michael (the economist is McGill, Jr.), and so
we decided to go to him. Reasonable prices, I think, and an all-around
feeling of competence. He's from Mississippi, and a real Southern
gentleman, too, as is the economist, who is from Tennessee.) This is
genuine progress! The big nuisance is that I can't enjoy my pipe for a
day, due to some risk of infection. Naturally, I can hardly think about
anything else! Hearing? It went pretty well, but since Sarah was there, I
just relied on her to repeat things for me, though I am sure the surgeon
and his cheerful assistants would have made sure I understood them. A lot
of their talk is helpful in explaining what is going on. But there were
few times when I had to make a response. I read that *one* reason poor
people had such bad health is that they do not have the intelligence to
make complex decisions about their health. I don't know where I fall in
comparison with Dr. David Ross's other patients. This is, after all, in
Montgomery County, Maryland, which I think ranks as the top or near the
top of counties in per capita holders of graduate degrees. I have two (MA
and PhD), but I'm also older, and raw brain power does decline with age,
as I am exceedingly well-aware, far more than those about me.
Sarah's brother's son, Byron, spent the evening with us. He has joined the
International House of Prayer in Kansas City (where I was born). He talked
about his religious experiences and visions. I was most interested in the
words he heard, not the images he saw and interpreted. Of course, we
argued, but I was most interested in his religious experiences. But my
hearing was very bad, so I'm afraid I didn't follow much of what he said.
Friday, 2008 August 15
Pipe! Pipe! "Glorious in a pipe/ Mellow, rich, and ripe." --Lord Byron,
The Island. I wasn't allowed to have one for twenty-four hours and
sometimes got rather feisty. It's all psychological. I anticipate the
ritual and its associated pleasures and indeed can think of it as an
entitlement. However, when we returned to the E.D. headquarter building,
then known as Federal Building No. 6 and now the Lyndon Baines Johnson
Federal Building (which befits the man who pushed through the Elementary
and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which has ballooned to over 700 pages
in the No Child Left Behind Act. How long was the original act? See
below.), the health fascists allowed no place anywhere to smoke except
outside in the often cold, wind, and rain. I decided just not to bother. I
made a global decision and hardly ever feel the urge or entitlement. I
reported "Run! Run! Glorious Run!" after a two-week mandatory break after
my operation.
Saturday, 2008 August 16
Instead of music practice, I watched the Olympics for three hours on
teevee. Since there were few times when I could see the speaker, I heard
very little. I'd rather be an athlete (just a jogger now in my old age and
decrepitude) than watch others. I make two exceptions every four years,
the women's and men's marathons at the Olympic Games. The women's marathon
was the most exciting sport event I've ever watched. The woman I was
rooting for, Paula Radcliffe (38) came in only at No. 23, but the winner
Constantina Tomescu (38) of Romania surged ahead half way and kept up an
ever widening lead until the end. (It may have lessened a bit at the end.)
She had tried this and sometimes failed in the past, so it was exciting
rooting for her. Paula will be her age for the 2012 games. So start your
rooting now! It was also thrilling to watch Dara Torres (41!) win a silver
medal (she lost by 0.01 second) in the women's 50 meter freestyle and
again in the women's 4x100 medley relay. (I missed her earlier medal.)
Also to see Michael Phelps get his eighth medal (men's 4x100 medley
relay). He made the difference in that race. He won some of his medals by
just 0.01 seconds. I'm not sure whether I saw Usain Bolt break the world
record in the 100 meter dash (9.69 seconds: I remember when the 100-*yard*
dash was done under 10 seconds for the first time), but I saw it in slow
motion several times.
Sunday, 2008 August 17
Time to get this out. Well past time. My last was on April 20. I'll
practice Singing Coach later today. After I finish Sound and Beyond Round
80 this week, I'll test myself again and increase the levels on several of
the modules for the first time since March.
Answer: The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was 32 pages
long. I had a hypothesis about NCLB, namely that its prime benificary
would be educrats. I predicted that it would balloon considerably each
step along the way from its first introduction in Congress to it final
signing into law. At each step there would be more and more work for the
whole army of interpreters. I had to compare pages of different sizes and
typefaces. Converted into the final format, the first bill was about 400
pages long. I calculated the ballooning to be 85%. One more victory for
Public Choice theory.
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