Deaf Girly sings (hmmm)

Working from home makes me do odd things. 

Things like eating an entire packet of Rich Tea biscuits without even noticing and working my way through some horrendous Spotify suggestions because I refuse to pay for the Premium service as really, it’s basically falling on deaf ears.

However, today’s procrastination project quite possibly took the biscuit, the very last Rich Tea in fact.

Today I decided to try a Spotify instrumental of a song I know the words to and I recorded myself on PhotoBooth on my Mac singing it…

Why? Well, I can tell you one thing, it wasn’t to become a YouTube star called Deaf Girly Sings – although actually, if I wasn’t so anonymous, that might not be a bad plan – it was to see how bad my voice sounds when I sing.

So I sang along to Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran, which is one of my favourite songs at the moment while Spotify produced a perfectly acceptable instrumental version of the song to sing along to.

And can I sing? Well, I’m not really sure as I don’t know whether I hear what most hearing people hear. But all the windows in the flat and crystal glasses are still in one piece so perhaps it wasn’t completely horrific. And I didn’t see any neighbourhood cats running for cover either.

Seriously though, I would love to be able to sing. Sing in a way that people liked to listen to. Sing in a way that when you were singing along to music in your car you didn’t have people wishing they were in the car next door. And singing in a way that didn’t result in your boss writing you a post-it note (albeit a lovely cute one) requesting you not to harmonise to the Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s version of Under a Bridge or she was going to have to jump out of a window.

In fact, if a genie popped out of my Turkish tea pot that’s currently bubbling away on the stove right now and said you can choose between two things, a perfect singing voice or perfect hearing, I would honestly have to go away and think about it, because as we know from The X Factor auditions, perfect hearing doesn’t necessarily give you a perfect singing voice.

When I was six and more hearing I was pretty obsessed with music. I was desperate to play the violin and my Ma finally realised how serious I was when she found me with her guitar under my chin attempting to play it with a pencil for a bow.

But what I didn’t realise then was that making the notes wasn’t guess work. For most people they were audible.

At 18, while practising for my grade 8 flute – which I did get, albeit not with startlingly great marks – I realised, having lost a chunk of my hearing two years previously, that I needed to build on my audio memory as much as possible. And each night before I went to bed, I would play middle C on the piano in my bedroom and then the A above that and sing them, locking them away in my head so that pitch was always there. So that even if one day I wouldn’t hear them, they would be in my head. For my flute this was brilliant as I just mentally transposed everything I was playing down an octave and my grumpy mermaid in Reinecke’s Sonata Undine sounded more like a disgruntled baby hippo to me.

Anyway, as I get back to the proper task in hand for this afternoon – writing – and delete the file called ‘DG sings’ for all of eternity. I can safely say that today’s procrastination activity certainly ranks up there with weird things to do when alone in a flat. But if you know of anyone who can teach people with a hearing loss to sing – Gareth Malone, a new documentary perhaps? –  please drop me a line as it’s up there on my lifetime achievements wish list.

Happy Wednesday peeps

DG

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