Global Sumud Flotilla activist Dr. Margaret Conolly condemns Israeli interception of aid ship and calls for sanctions on Israel
➖ ‘What we experienced in the last three days was barbaric, cruel, ugly and violent. I never saw such ugly, ugly control by an army’
➖ ‘They are locked, 2.3 million, into an open concentration camp’
Beethoven bit a wooden rod attached to his piano so he could keep composing while going deaf. The vibrations traveled up the wood, through his teeth, and into his skull. He wrote about why he kept going in 1802. It took medicine 175 years to catch up.
His hearing started failing at 28. By his mid-50s he was completely deaf. He premiered his 9th Symphony in Vienna on May 7, 1824, conducting along from the front of the orchestra even though he could not hear it. When the music ended, one of the singers had to turn him around so he could see the audience clapping behind him.
In October 1802, in a village outside Vienna called Heiligenstadt, he sat down to write a letter to his brothers. He had been close to ending his life. Instead he wrote: "It was only my art that held me back." He had not yet brought into the world all the music he had inside him. The letter was found in his room after his death. Today it is called the Heiligenstadt Testament.
He pressed one end of a wooden rod against his piano. He bit down on the other end. When he played, the vibrations traveled up the wood, through his teeth, into his jawbone, and into the inner part of his ear where sound gets turned into nerve signals. He could feel pitch, rhythm, and the force of the music through his bones.
This is called bone conduction. Sound is just vibration in the air, and the inner ear does not care how the vibration gets there. The ear canal is one route. Bone is another.
The first hearing aid that screwed into the skull was built in 1977 in Gothenburg, Sweden. A Swedish researcher, Per-Ingvar Brånemark, had spent two decades figuring out that titanium screws can grow permanently into living bone. His colleague Anders Tjellström turned the discovery into a hearing device. They placed a titanium screw behind the ear of a woman named Mona, who had lost her hearing to scarlet fever as a child. The screw connected to a tiny device that picked up sound and sent it through the bone. Mona heard her daughter's voice for the first time.
The FDA approved the device in 1996. Bone-anchored hearing aids are now standard treatment for certain kinds of hearing loss. Companies like Shokz sell bone-conduction headphones to runners who want music while still hearing traffic. The Bluetooth headset in your gym bag uses the same trick as the rod Beethoven bit two hundred years ago.
The 9th Symphony was written by a man who had not heard music in years. "Ode to Joy" was composed in silence. He felt every note in his teeth. He built the music from the inside out. Modern medicine eventually built the device he was making for himself with a stick. Two hundred years later, the deaf man at the piano was right.