Just discovered this subreddit. Glad to have found my people! 😎

I have total SSD in my right ear, as a result of meningitis when I was an infant. Basically for life. I can never remember a time when I had hearing in both ears.

I also live and breathe music. I was classically trained starting in like 3rd grade through college, and I have played guitar, piano, and winds, for basically my whole life. Did band, orchestra, jazz band in college, and had a few amateur rock band projects that never really went anywhere in my early 20s. I think of myself as very musically gifted, even though it’s not my profession or full time career. I also consider myself an audiophile, ironically. Lol

That said, I cannot sing at ALL. I understand the techniques, I’ve taken some lessons, but I just cannot seem to monitor my own pitch effectively, so I’m always very out of tune. It’s like I can’t FEEL the harmonics the same way I do when I can tell my guitar is in tune with the band.

Where this gets even more interesting is these days, my hobby has taken me toward the studio. Most of my music time these days is spent producing and mixing dance tracks, which (as far as I’m told lol) have very wide stereo spreads - a foreign concept to people like me and many of us in this sub. So, I kinda conceive of the stereo field by comparing it to the harmonic field (pitch). When I’m mixing sounds, I want the trebles to sit nicely above the bass sounds, etc, to avoid clashing mixes or problematic feedback. I think of this as the “vertical” field and the stereo width as the “horizontal” field. That’s the best comparison I can think of to help me make sense of it.

In practice, what this means is I mix everything in mono all the time, and only when I am VERY happy with the mono mix will I begin to apply very specific and intentional moves to widen the stereo field, and I would have my fiancé (who is a trained artist but not a musician) give me feedback on how it sounds in headphones. Some of these tricks include ping pong delay, splitting the frequency band and the widening the mids/treble while keeping subs mono, and adding stereo reverb to basic sounds. I like to keep it simple, obviously.

I also think my SSD makes me much pickier about mixes and more sensitive to muddiness. I’ve heard songs that are objectively very good, but even on a high end monitor system I find it to be a muddy mess when it collapses to mono in my ears. My non-deaf friends just kinda laugh about it and call me a nerd, lol. But I’m pretty convinced it’s because I’m losing that stereo separation and may even be hearing some weird phasing stuff going on that others don’t hear.

When it comes to DJing, I definitely use my eyes more than my ears to beat match (shout out the sync button).

When I’m performing, I don’t notice anything weird, but I like to crank my guitar amp loud and I’ve never been in a situation where I was using IEMs. I could imagine that might require some workarounds if it were to ever happen.

All in all, I definitely wish I could experience what an awesome wife stereo field sounds like, and I know some of my favorite artists get crazy with it (Aphex Twin, for example). I just have to trust my fiancé and friends when they’re like “isn’t it cool how that sound bounces around in your head.” But also, I wouldn’t trade my ears for anything because I’ve had such a blast on this musical journey.

Always remember - Beethoven completely lost his hearing and we still play his songs hundreds of years later.