Night-Vision Goggles for Your Ears

On September 26, 2011, Sarah Churman, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of two from Fort Worth, Texas, got into her car with her husband. When she closed the door, she says, the noise of it shutting sounded like a bomb going off. Sarah grabbed her phone and dialed her mother-in-law. During the call, one of her two daughters hopped on the line. "Hi, Mommy, I love you," she said. Sarah started bawling so hard that she couldn't catch her breath.

When her husband, Sloan, pulled off the highway later and Sarah opened her door, she said the sound of traffic was roaring. The horns honking and engines revving were thunderous. The two made their way into an Outback Steakhouse and got a table. When the waitress put their drinks down, Sarah jumped at the startling sound. When she began to eat her salad, the crunch of the lettuce was so powerful she couldn't hear what her husband was saying. The noise in her own head was like a cheap used-car commercial with the sound turned up to eleven. It was almost deafening.

Sarah was born with profound hearing loss. For years, she hadn't been able to hear anything quieter than eighty-five decibels. You could rev a gas-powered chain saw or shoot a .22-caliber rifle right next to her ear, and it would sound to her like a mumble. Then Sarah had a device surgically implanted in one ear. It processed sound vibrations, amplified them using the middle-ear bones, and sent them off into Sarah's brain, a task most people's ears handle naturally with tiny hairs (which Sarah was born without). Even in the most successful cases, recipients of the kind of implant Sarah got don't perceive sound quite the same way as people born without hearing problems do. But it's the next best thing. Her mother-in-law used the money she'd saved for retirement to pay for Sarah's surgery. Eight weeks after it, when Sarah's ear had healed, a technician turned the device on, and Sarah began to hear for the first time in twenty-nine years. Sarah truly appreciates the power of sound, something most of us take for granted.

If her name sounds familiar, you might have seen Sarah's first moments of hearing on YouTube or on Ellen DeGeneres's daytime talk show. Sloan captured the event on video and uploaded it. Then it went viral. By mid-2013, more than twenty million people had watched the clip: "Twenty-nine years old and hearing myself for the first time!" It's a heart-melting scene. The slender, brown-haired woman with a full sleeve of tattoos on her right arm stares doe-eyed at a technician, who slowly dials up Sarah's equipment. There's some beeping that Sarah hears first, and then you can see the full breadth of sound wash over her as the implant comes alive. She'd worn hearing aids most of her life, but she described them as always having a constant hum or white noise in the background and allowing her to hear only the loudest external sounds, and even then, every sound blended together so they all sounded muffled or garbled, like Charlie Brown's teacher. This sound was different: clear, bright, and loud as hell. In the YouTube video, she tries to play it cool when the device starts working. That goes to pot in about one second. The flood of emotion that comes with her new sense is almost too much for her to bear. She's self-conscious, so she covers her mouth, which is the way a proficient lip reader like her tries to hide what she's feeling. When Sarah starts shaking and tears start flowing, though, the emotion is obvious. And it's contagious. You can't help but imagine what's happening in her head.

In her memoir Powered On, Sarah shares a perspective you can't get from the video alone:

I realized I could hear the noises coming from my mouth. Then I realized how I sounded, and I got choked up. Then I laughed, and that sent me into a fit of tears. All these sounds were intensified because I was hearing all of this from inside myself for the first time, and I was completely and utterly overwhelmed like you cannot imagine. I feared my heart was gonna explode, and I just couldn't put into words what was racing through my mind.

"I don't want to hear myself cry," she says in the video. Then she laughs and surprises herself. "My laughter sounds so loud!"

"You'll get used to that over time," the technician says.

But it took a while.

It's impossible for a person born with hearing to know what it's like to suddenly get it after twenty-nine years. Even beginning to understand how much sound is all around you is an eye-opening experience. Ever feel frazzled and then realize the TV is blaring an annoying ad or news or a program you don't actually care about? That moment and the next one, when you turn off the TV, is a very basic example of soundscaping. That's the practice of identifying and controlling the sounds affecting you — the loud ones in the foreground, the slightly lower, less important ones in the midground, and the foundational rumblings or whisperings in the background. Some people call the act of noticing these various levels of sound "active listening." Soundscaping is something more. It involves determining which of those sounds are most useful to you, whether you're trying to find your way, figure out what's going on around you, tell a story, or change your mood. Put to use in all kinds of everyday situations, soundscaping is how you use the identification and curation of sound and music to make your world work better. In a way somewhat similar to how Sarah began to hear new sounds and understand the messages they carried, you can grow your sonic vocabulary, the palette of sounds you recognize and use to tell stories or design environments. You can also use this sonic vocabulary to create your own messages and impressions. To get started, you can do a little exercise that will give you a sense of how much sound you're missing at any given moment: Close your eyes and listen to your surroundings, wherever you are. As you do, think about the word wind. Do you suddenly hear air moving against things? Next, think about your own ears ringing. Do you immediately hear it?

Now close your eyes again. This time, keep them closed for a full two minutes and try to identify each tiny sound you hear. In the first few seconds, you'll probably notice the loudest sounds first: the music on the television in the other room, a door closing next to you. That's the foreground. But go deeper. Sit with it for a while. Maybe you hear highway traffic a mile away, or the sound of kids outside playing. That's the background. The midground is everything between the background and the foreground.

The longer you listen and the more you pay attention, the more you'll hear. You're not activating some kind of superpower or bionic hearing. You're not even hearing these sounds for the first time. These vibrations have been picked up by your ears all...