The remarkable gift of sound and hearing

This is a lovely memoir of the author Bella Bathurst, who lost her hearing when in her twenties and how that affected her. But within this memoir is also the story of what it’s like to lose your hearing, how it can impact on your mental health (more people commit suicide through hearing loss than through loss of vision) and your ability to interact with others. It covers themes including what sound is and how it can impact on people who have been exposed to both sound and its loss. Sound is a form of pressure that changes the molecules in the air and moves through the atmosphere but requires a receiver such as an ear and a brain to make sense of what we hear around us. But it can also be muffled and changed, think of how sound is altered by the acoustics of a room or the fall of snow on the floor (I love how it muffles sounds). We are born with an incredible voice recognition tool, we can detect the sound of someone's voice and who that voice belongs to, what they might be feeling, what they might be insinuating or meaning. Sound is full of wonderful properties and we can even fall under its spell as it becomes music. We can hear a ‘no’ or a ‘yes’ in many different ways and still determine its meaning.
The author talks about the deaf community and also of the power of visual communication such as sign language. By the end of the book, you will also have a profound sense of wonder at what sound is and its value in all our lives for those who are fortunate enough to be able to hear and the sad loss who don’t. Especially when you hear how notes can fall together as many instruments play and turn a range of notes into a full, rich cacophony that becomes a symphony. And every once in a while, close your eyes and really concentrate and listen to all the sounds around you. It’s a remarkable gift we should treasure, for those of us that are lucky and privileged enough to be able to hear.

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