During my teaching career, for no particular reason, I would sometimes pose this dilemma to my class: Suppose a madman has locked you in a room. He demands that you declare your two most valued senses. Universally, the students specified sight and hearing. Then the madman gives you a terrible choice: he will take away either your sight, or your hearing. Only then will he set you free. What an impossible choice.
Each of us has our own answer, but the students consistently chose blindness over deafness. Many of them were musicians, so that might have biased their decision, but overall the reasoning was that deafness would be more isolating, and that is what the students feared the most. From my wholly unscientific survey, I concluded that of all the senses, hearing is the one we value the most highly. All of which brings us to the case of the six-billion-dollar earplugs.
This story is from the December 2023 - January 2024 edition of Sound & Vision.
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This story is from the December 2023 - January 2024 edition of Sound & Vision.
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