LIKE FIFTY million other Americans, I have tinnitus. Not your ordinary, exasperating tinnitus where you hear a ringing in your ears, but a rare, exasperating form of tinnitus where you hear music—singing, not ringing.
Oliver Sacks, in his book Musicophilia, doesn't call what I have tinnitus; he calls it a “musical hallucination” and claims it's not that uncommon. Musical hallucinations, according to him, are “usually experienced by elderly people with hearing loss.” (I'm ninety-three, and without my new hearing aids, I'm as deaf as a doorknob.) Old folks assume that the music “is caused by an external source like a radio” (my experience exactly) “until they're compelled to infer that the music is generated by their brain.”
I suppose I should have suspected something of the sort. My neighbor's radio wasn't playing Top 40 or Golden Oldies—what you'd expect—but something that sounded, oddly enough, like operetta. “Far out,” I said to myself. “Which of my neighbors is dorky enough to dig Nelson and Jeanette?” When I heard it again weeks later, the music was okay, but after listening for a while it dawned on me that there were no commercials. Very odd! Still, what else could it be? Months later, when I heard it for the fifth time, I told my partner what I was experiencing and he told me it was probably in my head. Not good news.
At first they played (whoops! I
