We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background.
I don't know that hearing people have ever felt that experience of truly being left out. They have easy communication, while deaf people can't join in. It takes more time to communicate with us.
Some people can't physically hear things. A kid that listens to Metallica or something can't hear that, because he's filled himself up with this stuff, he physically can't hear a banjo or a harp or something.
But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone standing next to me heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair; a little more of that and I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back.
[On being deaf:] We must struggle for whatever may be had, without encroaching on the comfort of others.
Anybody who can't hear the difference between a ball hitting wood and a ball hitting concrete must be blind.
Everyone in my family is pretty much tone-deaf.
I just got an ear for the kind of things I like.
An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad.
Women hear rhythm differently than men.
You know, I don't think I've ever listened to someone's commentary. Ever.
One person's roar is another's whine, just as one person's music is another's unendurable noise.
Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.
At the end of the day, there are a hell of a lot of notes being played out there and I defy the average middle-American or the average punter to differentiate between them.
Have you ever noticed that when you must struggle to hear something, you close your eyes?
