How a Deaf Beethoven, Composed Wonderful Music That Survived Beyond His Grave

 

A composer who was deaf? That's really something to think about. Ludwig Van Beethoven gradually lost his hearing. It may have been caused by a lack of knowledge about lead poisoning at that time. The ZME Science gives this interesting detail on how Beethoven coped with his gradual hearing loss:

Despite living in pain, Beethoven did not give up. However, he had a helping hand. In order to continue composing and playing music, Beethoven stumbled across a physical phenomenon that is central to hearing: bone conduction.

At the time, scientists understood very little about how human hearing works. But despite the fact that his ears left him, he could still hear himself playing music by placing one end of a wooden stick onto his piano and clenching on the other end with his teeth. When notes were struck, the vibrations from the piano were transferred to his jaw, and from there directly to his inner ear. Miraculously, he could hear again! Bone conduction was born.

Sound is nothing more than acoustic vibration in the air. These juggling atoms vibrating at certain frequencies cause the eardrum to vibrate, which are transformed into a different kind of vibration that the cochlea, also known as the inner ear, can interpret. The cochlea then transmits the information about the sound to the brain via the auditory nerve where it is processed as hearing.

But there’s a second way that humans can hear besides air conduction. If the inner ear is directly exposed to acoustic vibration in the bones, then a person can still hear although the eardrum is bypassed. This is one of the reasons you can still hear your own voice if you plug your ears. It’s also how whales hear while diving deep in the ocean or how male elephants can listen for mating calls by stomping females several kilometers away.

Beethoven’s clever bone-conducting solution is used in some hearing devices today. A bone conducting hearing device, or BAHA, converts the sound picked up by its microphone into vibrations that are transmitted through the bones of the skull to the cochlea of the inner ear. Essentially, the bone conducting device fills the role of a defective eardrum.

Bone conduction hearing devices are also used by people with perfect hearing in certain applications. For instance, military headsets allow soldiers to hear orders relayed through a bone conduction device, sometimes integrated into the helmet, despite the background noise of enemy gunfire. Special bone conduction hearing devices also allow divers to both hear and talk underwater.

This amazing trivia on Facebook was indeed amazing. I've heard of blind pianists who may be playing by ear. I was baffled by how Beethoven composed many of my favorite classic music pieces. However, this may also explain why Beethoven went deaf:

The hair was put through a barrage of DNA, chemical, forensic, and toxicology tests. What immediately stood out was an abnormally high level of lead. During Beethoven’s time, people weren’t aware of lead poisoning and it was quite common to use plates for food and goblets for drinking made out of the toxic metal. Even the wine of that era, Beethoven’s favorite drink, often contained lead as a sweetener. This severe lead poisoning may have contributed to the composer’s lost hearing. 

Beethoven eventually died at only 56 years old--in an era of short life expectancy, on March 26, 1827. However, the amazing music that he made, while he was losing his hearing, is ironically heard up to this very day!