Sunday, May 31, 2009

Musical Auditory Therapy

I asked a friend, Amanda, one of the musicians at my church, if she'd be willing to do some musical auditory therapy with me to help me regain some of my sorely missed music. Neither of us quite knows what we are doing, so we are exploring it together. We recorded part of our first session. We started out with me trying to match a single pitch at a time. She sang a note, and I tried to copy it. She gave me hand signals to tell me to go up or down, and when I was matching it. One cool thing was I came to recognize a sense of resonance in my head when the pitches matched! This is going to be a fascinating process, to say the least. Then I sang Jesus Loves Me; then we sang it together so I could match her pitch as we went. I can't really quite tell when I'm on pitch yet. I'm closer sooner on the first few notes above middle C; after about G it gets pretty fuzzy.

Another friend told me today that Amanda said she saw (heard) amazing progress just in one hour. WooHoo!! I'm not sure how often we will meet, but I will keep you all posted, for sure...

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3 Comments:

Blogger sara said...

Hi Liz,
Thanks for posting this. I'm about 1 month past activation with my CI and love talking with others about music things. I'm still playing tenor sax in a 90 piece concert band and in a 7 piece saxophone ensemble. It's a bit crazy and I definitely need to take time playing by myself too to get used to how my sax sounds now. Band is rough, but I'm hearing useful things I've never heard before, like the percussion. Makes it easier to stay on time.

12:29 PM  
Blogger Liz said...

Hi Sara,
Last we chatted (by email) you weren't ready for the CI yet. And I said you'd know when you were. I guess that time has come and now you've got it! Congratulations! How is speech comprehension for you? I'm excited to hear you can still play in your band. That is a soul need, I'm sure.
Thanks for keeping in touch!
Liz

5:52 PM  
Blogger sara said...

Everyone who said I would know when I was ready were exactly right :) I was ready and impatient and now it's done and I'm wondering about a second one, but trying not to think about it yet.

My speech comprehension scores in the booth were around 95% on HINT sentences in quiet and 76% in a little noise. I don't think I'm anywhere near that good in real life yet, but it's definitely better than with my hearing aids.

Keep sharing your music experiences :)

12:13 PM  

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