Epilogue

“February 13th. – Morning, C sharp, B flat, F sharp in right; B in left. Night, E flat, C flat.
February 14th. – Morning, E flat, C flat. Night, C sharp, B flat, F sharp.
February 15th. – Morning, C sharp, B flat, F sharp. Night, C sharp, B flat, F sharp.
February 16th. – Morning, C sharp, B flat, F sharp. Night, F sharp, E flat.
February 17th. – Morning, E, C sharp, A. Night, D, B, G, and so forth.”¹

All beings capable of hearing move slowly towards deafness. Auditory life fades like a fade-out: some frequencies weaken, others disappear, and certain sounds remain as residues. Roosa wrote down the notes his patients heard inside the ear—C sharp, B flat, F sharp—as though each person carried an involuntary composition within them.

Tinnitus occupies a place that is difficult to locate. It sounds inside the body, yet it presents itself with a strangeness akin to an external sound. The ear receives and also produces; it listens to the world while listening to itself. When a frequency disappears, the brain may reconstruct it as a phantom presence. What can no longer be heard returns as a whistle, hum, bell, voice, engine or sustained note.

For centuries, those who suffered these sounds tried to compare them with things they knew: carriages, mills, dogs, frogs, violins, hammers or boiling water. Giving them a name brought them closer to the world. Evan Yellon proposed another gesture: “if we can bring the noise towards harmony, it ceases to be noise and becomes ordered sound.”² To musicalise a painful sound could open up a form of control, consolation and freedom.

This transformation also appears in music that continues after its origin has been lost. In Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic, the orchestra keeps playing as the sound sinks and dissolves beneath the water. In Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, the recorded voice of an unknown man returns again and again, accompanied by an orchestra that grows around someone who had probably already died. Repetition welcomes absence and grants it duration.

Michel Serres describes the sick body as a body whose organs have begun to hear one another. In the silence of the theatre at Epidaurus, the inner noise subsides and the body stops listening to itself for a moment.³ Serres extends this image to society: a group may be deafened by its own din, unable to attend to anything arriving from outside. Listening requires opening an interruption within that noise.

It also requires another person. Peter Szendy asks how a singular listening can be conveyed and how someone might listen to us listening. We repeat a fragment, play it again and search for words with which to share what we have heard. “The listener I am does not exist as long as you are not there,” he writes.⁴ Each act of listening addresses another and forms with it an open sum of singularities.

When forms disappear, a murmur still remains. Emmanuel Levinas called this anonymous and inextinguishable presence of existence the il y a: something like the sound of an empty shell, “as though the void were full, as though silence were a noise.”⁵ At this threshold, between loss and persistence, listening continues. The world fades, leaves a trace and resonates again in what remains.

“Listening is rooted in silence and deafness.”⁶