ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

Oh dear. A week, as they say, is a long time in politics, but it’s an even longer time in hissing hearing aids. Ever since allowing myself to be persuaded by Clinic O that the abominable static noise emanating from the circuitry of my newly acquired Danalogic i-FIT 71 aids might be something which could be conquered by the neural plasticity of my auditory cortex, ie I’d get used to it, I’ve somewhat regretted it.

Although it is a marvellous coping phenomenon that my brain fashions the hiss into the phantom noise of a shower when I am in the bathroom, and the noise of a deep fat fryer when I am in the kitchen, its creativity is stumped when I’m in silence. In quiet surroundings, the hiss sounds just like an annoyingly hissing pair of hearing aids. It’s loud enough to mask other high frequency sounds, and I’m worried that an escaped rattlesnake could sneak up behind me undetected.

Demented in the empty office at work on Wednesday, I sought solace in the perfect place to escape from the hiss. The studio. “Budge up!” I said enthusiastically to a student, who had been reclining comfortably on the sofa with her book until my unexpected arrival with my laptop disturbed her. I listened for a bit to make sure that the soundscape was to my liking, then sat down to attend to my daily mountain of emails. Ah, this was more like it. The hiss was slightly less audible. The studio was only half full of students, but they were working in groups so were producing plenty of chat. I was slightly disappointed that there was no loud music, but was heartened to hear the reassuring rumble of the extraction system overhead. The noise of 60 feet of exposed industrial ducting was going some way towards drowning out the hiss but was not eliminating it entirely. I was on the verge of asking someone to open a window so that the noise of the nearby motorway could help out a bit, when an even better solution presented itself in the form of some impromptu furniture moving by students. Several chairs and desks were dragged mercilessly back and forth across the bare concrete floor, producing a rich variety of soothing scraping and grinding noises. Ahhhh. That’s better I said to myself, I can’t even hear the hiss now when I listen out for it. Maybe they were right at Clinic O after all!

Then it all got spoiled. Without warning, a heavy 6 by 4 foot sheet of mdf was knocked over by accident, causing a very loud bang. Although the bang itself was extremely acoustically satisfying in the bare concrete space, it was followed by a pregnant silence as everyone waited to see if there had been a casualty. This was all the hiss needed in order to sneak back in to my consciousness. Ssssssssss. Then to my relief, a round of shrieking and laughter began, followed by a purposeful bout of hammering to fix the damage. Phew.

The studio door banged open and shut with a pleasing regularity throughout, and every so often, the plumbing let out its usual foghorn blast every time a tap was turned on. As I basked in the racket, I reflected that the only thing that could possibly make the ambience more perfect for masking unwanted hissing noises from hearing aids, was the sounding of the twice weekly fire alarm test.

“Can I talk to you about my project?” said a student who had just wandered into my field of vision.

“Certainly”, I said, hoping there was going to be plenty to look at.

Test or Toast?

“Must remember to ask someone to put a seat on this flippin’ toilet”, I said to myself for the umpteenth time since the start of term, prompted by the familiar touch of cold ceramic. This encouraged me not to linger any longer than necessary, and turned out to be fortuitous. When I emerged from the toilet after the quietest few minutes I’d had all day, I discovered that the fire alarm was sounding and there was a distinct air of the Marie Celeste about the place.

Cripes, how long has that been going off for? I said to myself, glad that if this was a real fire, the missing toilet seat might just have saved my life. I spotted a freshly made cup of tea and a steaming bowl of porridge abandoned in the kitchen area, and this persuaded me it was time to leave. I set off for the nearest exit, feeling slightly nostalgic for our old building and its painfully loud alarm system which necessitated fingers in ears and a swift exit, no matter where you were when it went off. It was clearly put in place by someone who understood the difficulty of trying to empty a building of students in under five hours.

The new building, previously a call centre, has a much quieter alarm and it would appear that two toilet doors are enough to come between me and it. Just as I was wondering how many hearing impaired people had emerged from institutional toilets over the years to find themselves engulfed by a wall of flames, the fire alarm stopped. Thankfully, it was a test after all.

I added ‘get toilet seat’ to my high-level academic To Do list, and made a mental note never to spend more than two minutes in the toilet in future, just in case.

Walls Come Tumbling Down

When it was decided at Monday’s meeting that the dividing walls between the three brand new studio spaces in the temporary building were going to be opened up to facilitate more discussion across year groups of students, I had rather mixed feelings. The discussion bit was good, but if the background noise generated by fifty students in one open plan space had been slightly troublesome for the cookie bite ears, the background noise of one hundred and fifty in three conjoined open plan spaces could be somewhat problematic. As is customary during my many moments of internal crisis, a vision of a newspaper headline flashed before my eyes. It was suitably dramatic.

Frightened by what desperate feats of construction I was capable of after this premonition, I made an immediate and impassioned plea for a rethink on the knocking down of walls. Unfortunately, it didn’t work, but the concession was that a movable structure would be provided to act as a sound barrier during testing moments of inter-studio noise interference. I await with interest…

New Office Checklist…With Hearing Aid

If the decant manager showing the woman with the hearing aid her new office thought she was a little uptight, even odd, he didn’t show it.

“So, as you can see, you’ve got great views from these windows”, he said, “you’re here first so you can bag this space before everyone else! They’ll all be jealous!”

The woman didn’t seem that interested in the view.

“Do those windows open? Is that the motorway over there?” she interjected, fiddling with her ear. After an affirmation on both points, she had lost interest in the windows entirely and was now turning her attention elsewhere. “Is that an air conditioning unit up there?”

She pointed to the ceiling.

She was told that it was but it wasn’t currently commissioned. “Good”, she said, even though the ambient summer heat seemed to be bringing her out in a visible sweat. As she set about scrutinising the location of the only power socket next, she seemed to be inexplicably pleased that it was right next to the door, at the back of the room.

“Can you ask them to put my desk right here”, she said.

“This office is a lot bigger than the old one, isn’t it!” said the decant manager cheerily, noting her strange request. He’d have had the nice window seats like a shot. The woman gave him a strange look before striding alarmingly towards him.

“Eh?” she blurted, “What was that you said, sorry, I’m a bit, er….”

The decant manager repeated his quip, even though it had now lost a little of its spontaneity. The woman laughed in agreement and said she was glad she’d got in first to bag the best seat. The decant manager was puzzled, but went along with her enthusiasm. They said their goodbyes, but just as he opened the door to leave, she called him back.

“What’s that up there?” she said anxiously. She was pointing to a small vent in the ceiling above her prized new desk space. “Does it make a noise when it’s on?”

“No, don’t worry”, laughed the decant manager, “it’s not making any noise, that system’s been decommissioned”.

“Phew”, she said, “For a moment, I was worried it was all a bit too perfect”.

Teaching with a hearing loss

It's goodbye to all this...

When I started this blog, I had grandiose ideas about adapting the studio learning environment I teach in to minimise the impact of my hearing loss on my interactions with students, whilst at the same time improving certain aspects of the environment for everyone. This all sounded great in theory, but art studio spaces, and their inhabitants, are something of a law unto themselves and I have spectacularly failed at everything I set out to do.

Forget U-shaped seating arrangements at discussions. There is an irreconcilable conflict between your need to have the speakers as uniformly close to you as possible, and the students’ desire to be as uniformly far away from you as possible.

Forget moving closer to the person doing the speaking. Art students love mess, and it would not be the first time an abandoned wardrobe from a skip, or some eye-poking construction hanging from the ceiling has come between my straining ear and the elusive mumbles of a Type 5 Inaudible speaker.

Forget making sure no-one talks with their back to the audience. People love talking with their back to the audience, especially those with quiet voices.

Forget asking the speaker to speak up/ raise their hand before speaking. You’ll wear out your vocal cords in the first five minutes and get nowhere.

Forget eliminating background noise. You can’t, with sixty people rattling around in a room where the only acoustic damping is provided by an Ikea sofa and a burst cushion from a skip.

In the face of my failure, I am consoling myself with the fact that any infrastructural alterations would have been a waste of time anyway, since the building I work in is about to be demolished in a few days to make way for a shiny new building. My innovative but untested strategies, such as nailing all the seats to the floor to prevent them being scraped loudly every time someone moves, and installing a power tool immobilisation system for use during group discussions will hopefully be redundant in a state of the art building. More conventional strategies may be found here.

Fortunately, I’m about to get a second chance at my project, because our temporary home is another concrete lined open-plan space. There is now no hiding place for my No.1 sneaky HOH coping tactic of talking to students in the office instead of at their desks, because there is no room for an office in the new space. I shall need to apply my mind to finding another solution, but as the saying goes, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.

We shall see.

There’s Something On Your…

After taking a short stroll through the studio yesterday morning to check on the final year degree show preparations, I was rather annoyed to find my new black trousers covered in wet white paint, and a displaced post-it note saying ‘this plinth belongs to J. McSporran, 4th year Illustration’ stuck to my backside.

With this in mind, I have been conducting regular inspections of my person today, but clearly not regularly enough. When I looked in the mirror this afternoon after doing a tutorial with a student, who I assumed was distracted by degree show nerves, I realised that I had the hearing aid equivalent of an unzipped fly: an eyecatching 3cm of slim tube retention piece poking horizontally out of my  left ear.

Cool…

Punctuality is for Losers

My strange phobia of being late means that I am often the first to arrive at meetings at the Institute of Artistic Endeavour. This can create an unfortunate false impression of keenness in the face of the dullest of administrative matters. Especially when making matters worse by sitting at the front with my eyes open at all times.

Today’s keenness, however, was genuine. I was eager to attend a creative writing workshop for staff and students, hosted by the newly appointed writer in residence, a famous author. The workshop was scheduled to start at 3:30. I arrived at exactly 3:27, just in case there were any free buns to be had, but this turned out to be so early that the door to the room wasn’t even open. Oh well, I thought, at least I can get a good seat, and I eagerly barged my way into the empty room. Once inside, I was rather confused to find my empty room filled with a group of strangers seated reverently round a large table covered in books and papers, and I paused momentarily as my eyes scanned the scene with great urgency in an attempt to work out what the heck was going on.

Empty room. Full room. Early. Late. Big group of art students. Silence. A table with no legs missing in an art school. Nothing made sense in the split second it took for my brain to catch up with my eyes. When it eventually did, the sight of the famous author at the head of the table confirmed that I was, in fact, in the right place after all, but rather late. Late! Oh no.  I made a desperate lunge towards the empty seat nearest the door, letting out a very squeaky and unintentionally loud “Hi everybody” as I did so. Strangely there was no reply.

Puzzled at the church-like atmosphere, I settled myself into my seat and tried to act nonchalantly, as if I was late for things all the time. It felt quite good, until my fantasy was interrupted by the rustle of paper and the faint sound of some occasional consonants from the other end of the table. To my horror, it was coming from the Type 5 Inaudible student, who had been reading her carefully prepared passage to the group, until the strange woman with the squeaky voice came in and talked over her.

Empire of the Biscuit

Boredom is a terrible thing. During a tedious afternoon stint at the computer the other day in the office, I realised that the solution to my lack of motivation was a cake. A mandarin Danish pastry, to be precise. I scrabbled together the required £1 in loose change and hot-tailed it to the refectory.

When I got there, the sight of a lone student sweeping the floor in semi-darkness told me that closing time had arrived. I made my way efficiently to the cake display and surveyed my options. The display was bare apart from the last black cherry Danish pastry and a couple of sad-looking Empire biscuits with holes in the icing where the jelly tots should be. Hmmm. Tough decision. I don’t like black cherries and the only bit of an Empire biscuit I like is the jelly tot on top.

“Excuse me”, said the student uncharacteristically audibly, as she swept her brush round my feet in a symbolic gesture aimed at speeding up my thought processes.

It worked. I decided that a black cherry Danish pastry was better than no Danish pastry at all, and I reached swiftly for a paper bag to put it in. My arm brushed the ‘PLEASE USE TONGS TO HANDLE CAKES’ notice and I decided to ignore it in a huge display of anti Health & Safety bravado.

“Excuse me”, said the sweeping student again, as a giant hairball interwoven with unidentified fragments of refectory detritus threatened to engulf my feet. I wondered briefly if the missing jelly tots were in there, before abandoning hope and turning my attention back to my Danish pastry. Another set of lights clicked off. Feeling a bit under scrutiny, I reckoned I’d better comply and use the tongs after all. I clamped them firmly to the pastry and ushered its sticky loveliness gently into the protective caress of the paper bag.

Quite how it managed to fall cherry side down in the pile of floor sweepings at my feet I’ll never know, but the unseen string attaching the cake tongs to the counter may have had something to do with it.

Stage Left

A nice empty studio caused by the atrocious weather

As the Christmas pantomime season gets into full swing, I feel that I may have found an exciting new career. My defective sound locating faculties ensure that every group discussion hosted by me is accompanied by embarrassing shouts from the audience of “They’re behind you!”, “They’re over there!” and the even more embarrassing “They’re right in front of you!” every time someone speaks. At the sight of my frantic head rotations, passing strangers could be forgiven for thinking that there was a faulty pair of eyes in charge of the proceedings, rather than a faulty pair of ears.

It would seem that the hearing aid causes my brain to tell me that every distant sound emanates from my left ear canal. Whilst I know that, to the best of my knowledge, there are no students in my left ear canal, my head still insists on turning there first anyway, when taken by surprise. The necessary cognitive manual over-ride of this reflex takes valuable milliseconds, which allows just enough time to completely miss the question and for impatient audience heckling to start.

Still, I may have a glittering future as a groundbreaking Method acting pantomime dame ahead of me.

The Leg

After watching the spectacular Michael Caine B-horror movie ‘The Hand’ recently, I’m starting to wonder if my right leg is possessed and trying to kill me. A mere 48 hours after tripping me up at the restaurant, it was up to its old tricks in the studio today, as I attempted to negotiate the 50 sprawled bodies who were drawing on large sheets of paper on the floor, at my foolish instruction.

There was barely a square inch of floor left to walk on, but when I finally noticed a student at the back who had been unsuccessfully trying to attract my attention for quite some time, I thought I’d give it a go. I delicately tip-toed across the room in one metre strides, being very careful not to slip on a loose sheet of paper like my unfortunate cousin, who dislocated his knee when he slipped on a copy of the Sunday Times Magazine back in 1986.

My slightly ungainly traverse of the room went unnoticed by the majority of the group, until The Leg mischievously decided to insert an extra stride, causing me to lose my balance and step heavily on to a student’s box of materials. At the sound of his stuff scattering everywhere, 50 heads turned simultaneously in my direction.

I hung on to a structural pillar to steady myself, before losing my balance again and leaving a big Nike footprint on his drawing.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry…” I said, as the students nearby frantically snatched their possessions and work from my trajectory of destruction.

“It’s okay, Moira”, said the recipient of my footprint generously, no doubt glad that I had stepped on his drawing and not on him.