Sound isn't Background. It's Biography.
From the midweek diaries: cassette ghosts, makeshift altars & the spine of a mic stand.
Tone-deafness, I’ve come to learn, isn’t a flaw.
It’s a neurological quirk—an unreachable distance, if you will, in how the brain receives sound. Those born with it—congenital amusia, it’s called—aren’t choosing dissonance; their ears simply follow other rules.
A different frequency of knowing. A space between pitch & perception. And isn’t that, in its own way, a kind of music too?
Of course, I can know this—& still not understand it.
Tone-deafness will always not make sense to me, like someone insisting the colour blue is the quietest of all vegetables.
My gorgeous cousins—technically brothers, sonically something else entirely—sang like the notes were wild horses they’d been asked to lasso blindfolded. Their pitch wandered, wobbled, sometimes collapsed entirely. But god, they sang. With devotion. With gusto. As if the sheer act of singing was its own kind of triumph. Meanwhile, I was trapped in the back of their sports-cars en route to football games, mentally duct-taping my own eardrums shut.
When I asked if they could hear the melody collapsing like a pavlova someone forget in the oven, they blinked. “Sounds great,” they said. And honestly? That kind of confidence should be bottled & sold.
Now I must confess. I was born with ears like tuning forks. Not metaphorically—viscerally. I hear things most people don’t. It’s sharp. Not trained—tuned. As if I’d been born with a taut string pulled through the bones of my face. The world played itself against me, & I vibrated in response.
I could hear a lie tucked inside a lullaby.
Feel the drop in someone's spirit when their voice wavered at the end of a sentence, even if their smile never faltered.
Listening wasn’t a choice. It was how I was wired. It was a condition. Later, a doctor would diagnose it as hyperacusis, but back then, I called it instinct. Or vigilance.
There were the sounds from half a street away. A moth knocking against glass. The faint click of something unlatching. My hearing startles people. I pause mid-sentence, tilt my ear. My eyes move before my body does, tracking the sound. Sometimes it’s so faint I have to wait for it to come again.
People get unnerved.
Their laughter falters. Forks pause mid-air. Eyes dart to windows no one’s opened.
“What is it?” they ask.
“Nothing,” I lie.
But it’s never nothing.
I’ve learned not to explain—because how do you tell someone their silence just cleared its throat?
Try living with that, is what I really want to say, when people get impatient, or make fun. And on occasion, when my irritation threatens the air. But mostly, I don’t. I just tilt my head & go on listening. Because to me, sound isn’t background—it’s biography. A map of where I’ve been. A measure of truth. A way to know the world’s intent before it touches me.
It’s not always easy. To have ears that never let me truly rest.
And once you’ve lived that way—heard that way—
silence becomes something else entirely.
Long before the voice learns to rise, the ear learns to kneel.
It is the first opening, the first intimacy.
In the womb, we do not see. We do not speak. We hear.
The mother’s breath. Her pulse.
The rhythm of blood as it moves through her body like a tide chart.
We calibrate our being to those sounds.
That is our first cathedral.
I didn’t speak early.
And that disturbed them more than my staring.
(If you’re new here, you might want to read Instinct Dressed as Skin—preferably with the lights on. A little background of me as an infant.)
Sure, I had tests done. The same doctor who checked my heart—its murmur, its other special traits—would play a sound that almost had me rise, cat-like, to the ceiling.
My mother would get irritated. Why won’t you speak?
My father, for reasons unknown, would peer into my ears & throat, as if a voice might be hiding in there, curled up & waiting for permission.
But like all good doctors, he sent them on their way—with their quiet, staring child—& a note of reassurance: You remember how long she took to be born, don’t you? Her voice will come when she’s ready.
And don’t worry—once I finally decided to join the land of the verbal, after the age of two, my mother lived to regret ever encouraging a word from my mouth. If I had a dollar for every If you’d only stop talking…, I could’ve funded my own independent radio station by kindergarten. Not that I was allowed to attend. But that’s a story for another time.
Sound wasn’t just something I heard. It saturated me—pooled behind my eyes, curled down my neck, landed in my belly like a question.
There’s a reason silent is just listen rearranged. My body understood this as law.
As I kept recording the sounds around me, the world’s frequency began to teach me where I belonged in the scale of things.
Others were louder. Quicker.
They reached for language like it was something owed.
I waited for it to feel earned.
This is how it begins, isn’t it?
With mimicry. The small mouth tracing the rise & fall of a lullaby, the soft imitation of vowels overheard in twilight kitchens. The voice does not emerge fully formed—it is assembled. From overheard grief. From laughter behind closed doors. From the whisper of a song sung two rooms away.
I began to understand: sound is more than information—it’s emotion made transmissible. A bridge built entirely from breath.
And then one day, the vocal escapes us.
As if the self can no longer stay folded in.
That first cry? That unformed utterance?
It’s not just noise.
It’s proof: I’m here. I’ve heard. Now hear me.
When my aunt sang—the mother of those two tune-challenged cousins—I remember crawling into her lap & resting my head against her chest. Not to be held, but to listen from the inside. I could feel the breath rise beneath my cheek, feel the sound as it left her body & entered the air between us. I was trying to find it—the place where voice begins.
It felt holy. Secret. Like something I wasn’t supposed to know, but needed to.
Years later, my cat would do the same to me.
She would crawl upon me & press herself into me when I sang—head forward in my sternum, eyes wide, as if asking, What is that, Mumma? Where is that sound coming from?
I didn’t have an answer then either.
Only that it came from somewhere beneath the bones.
And asked to be let out.
I hadn’t meant to sing aloud—that first time I did it anywhere other than home.
It slipped out in the comfort of that room.
I’d always sung, but only for myself.
In my bedroom. Sometimes in the shower, or the bathroom. The acoustics, right? My mother & father had heard me, yes. But no one else.
I made it a habit never to have my back to a door—it’s a predator thing. But that day, I was in the art room during lunchtime, working on a piece for my next assignment. My head was down, focused. And I was singing.
Until: “Where in the bloody hell from God has this voice of yours been hiding?”
I always laugh when I think of my teachers, given they taught in a private Catholic school. The amount of blasphemy was never lost on me.
She stepped into my space & stared. I stammered. Told her it wasn’t me. How I thought I could convince her of this—given I was the only person in the room & there was no music playing—is beyond me.
But something in her, some soft instinct for shyness, made her open her blue eyes wide & say, “Oh, I must have misheard. I’m sorry to have startled you.”
She looked at what I was working on & said, “That’s a beautiful shade of crimson.”
I hoped she meant the paint.
I’m certain it was my face.
That wouldn’t be the last of it. In our next drama class, she had me stand on a chair, circled the students around me, & made me sing. The song I had been singing when she’d caught me—& another she chose.
There’s something I need to tell you about what it feels like for me to sing in front of people. I’m an extreme introvert—despite a brief, misguided flare of boldness in adolescence, I’ve always been shy. Yet before I utter a single note, it’s like being sealed inside a bubble. Blood-warm. Protective, yes—but with the air of something about to split. A sudden, sterile stillness where only your own voice exists—amplified, unshielded, like standing skinless in a snowfall.
I sang to the door, afraid to meet anyone’s gaze. I had no idea what was happening in the room around me—only the sound of my own voice, & the thud of my pulse in my throat.
When I finished, the room fell silent. At first, I was relieved. Then I realised why.
If my classmates weren’t crying, they were stunned.
This girl who walked in the shadows with her head down—
could sing.
Could sing?
I stepped down to words I don’t remember. Some were trying to hold me, hug me.
I’m not one for being touched by people I don’t know well—despite the Mediterranean infusion in my blood, where everyone kisses a dozen times before they’ve even said hello. What I did know was that I didn’t like the attention. Still, my teacher—ever the quiet witness—wouldn’t be giving up on me, any time soon.
To this day, I still hum more than I speak. Still turn inward before turning outward. Music—when it’s real—is the original flame. The breath before it chooses a shape. It doesn’t need to make sense to me. But it does need to land.
Of course, I’ve sung on stage. In choruses, mostly. Backup vocals. The odd number my father roped me into singing alone—those who’ve read A Mildly Disappointing Soufflé might remember the opera.
And then there was the birthday gig. A friend’s thirtieth. His dream was to be a rock star lead vocalist. My then-boyfriend was on drums, the birthday boy’s wife played lead guitar, & I was tucked behind the mic providing back-up, in one of our favourite pubs. Until a break in the set became my only brush with being a rock diva: two of his favourite U2 songs, sung as a surprise for him. He couldn’t sing, bless him—his timing so off he had to watch our feet tapping to keep the beat.
But he beamed. And for once, I didn’t mind being seen.
Even by his crowd of lawyer friends—drinks in hand, neckties undone, arms in the air as if we really were saving somebody’s soul.
Moments like that were rare. Brief flickers where I let myself be witnessed, without bracing. This is, perhaps, why I resist the idea of performance. It suggests a for. For the audience. For the applause. For the moment. I’ve never sung for those things. When I do sing, it’s because the note has been vibrating against my ribs for days & needs somewhere to go. It’s because my grief has become melody-shaped & joy has sharpened itself into soprano. The silence has begun to bruise.
This is also why recordings of my own vocals frighten me. They trap the moment. Fix it. Embalm it. I’ve always preferred music as incense—something that lingers, yes, but cannot be held.
And yet. I recorded one.
I had no intention of doing so. There was no plan. No performance in waiting. Just the knowing—that she, the only woman who had ever truly mattered to me since birth, was going to die.
My dear cousins & precious uncle had begun making arrangements. They asked me gently, with the kindest of eyes—eyes I couldn’t say no to. But I couldn’t quite say yes either. They wanted to know if I might sing at her funeral. Not now, not yet. But soon.
I sat with their request for days, trying to find another way.
And then—one evening, in my lover’s car, the roof down, the sea keeping pace beside us, the piano began to play. The song unfolded like a hand reaching out. And as the first vocals lifted, the sky cracked—clean & white with lightning. It was violent, certain. A sign offered. And received.
It wasn’t a song I grew up singing. Not one she had asked for. Not even one she knew. It was simply the one that arrived. The one that chose me. A current I surrendered to for a voice not yet sure of itself, but for one who had always heard me anyway.
There was no studio. Just a little room I’d turned into a makeshift design den. A microphone. A digital piano my lover had gifted me—one I barely knew how to play. I recorded it in a single evening. Anything more would’ve undone me. To sing in front of her would have shattered the last scaffolds I was clinging to.
She didn’t know it was coming. That I’d made it. That I would bring it in.
And yet, I did.
Earbuds—one for her, one for me.
Her body already pulling back from the world, but her eyes—sharp, open, still tethered to mine.
I didn’t watch the door, nor care that my back was toward it.
I didn’t watch the machines.
I watched her begin to listen.
That was the entire performance.
Her face changed—marginally, meaningfully.
As she heard the first unsteady piano keys, & closed her eyes the moment the vocal arrived.
That stillness—I recognised.
It was the one she saved for truth.
When it ended, she said nothing at first. Just let the silence settle between us like steam. My hand in hers. My head resting on the curve of her hip, just as I’d done all my life. Someone in the room wept—I think it may have been my cousin.
My lover’s hand was still on my ankle, tethering me from the visual tremble.
But she stayed quiet, eyes closed.
I moved my head to her chest, as I had done as a baby & stayed there.
Until finally she whispered:
You did good, baby girl. Real good. Really good. Play it again.
That was it.
That was the benediction.
There is so much of this song I once wished I could change. There’s a moment, halfway through, where my voice breaks—too hard. It’s a gentle song. I know that. The whole world knows it. But in that moment, I had to sing it louder than I wanted to. The tears had already begun to fall, & I couldn’t let my voice follow.
I needed to hold the notes. I couldn’t let them falter—not now. Not for her.
Thankfully, my love had gifted me a mic stand—
& it became my spine. The only thing holding me upright when everything else wanted to fold.
So yes, there are things I’d do differently.
I’m not a trained singer. I can still hear every flaw, every fray, every breath that caught where it shouldn’t.
But none of it mattered. None of it.
Because that younger woman—who showed up, who sang through the shatter—wasn’t trying to impress her aunt.
She sang because she had no other way left to speak.
Because love, in its truest form, has no need for polish.
It only asks for what is real.
And I am so deeply proud of her—for standing tall, for offering her voice anyway.
There was only one other time I recorded myself. I was a child then—four or five, perhaps. One afternoon, I must’ve slipped into a quiet room with a cassette recorder. I don’t remember pressing the buttons. I don’t remember what I sang. Only that it happened. That my voice—small, reed-thin, shy as dusk—was captured. A trace of myself, briefly framed in magnetism.
I do know that when my mother entered the room, the tape didn’t stop. But I did whisper into the microphone—something like, I’m going to stop the singing now because my mother’s come in, & I don’t want her to hear me. Or words to that effect. I heard it a few times in adolescence, & found myself charmed by that little sweetheart—so earnest, so careful, already learning how sacred the voice could be.
I don’t know where that cassette is now. It was likely passed on, misplaced, or quietly lost to time—like so many things I once held close. But that doesn’t matter anymore. Because what that recording held wasn’t just a sound. It was the proof of something still forming. The earliest evidence of a little girl learning to speak—not with certainty, but with spirit. Her own.
Years later, I would bring a new voice to a bedside. Worn, trembling, untrained—but true. A voice shaped by grief & gratitude. A voice that had waited decades to be heard.
And there, in the presence of the only woman who ever truly knew me, I let that voice rise.
Just for her.
And somehow, for that little girl who sang to her audience of teddy bear, her indifferent pussycat & long-suffering terrier.
Only six people have ever heard this recording.
Myself. My two cousins. My uncle. My love at the time. And her.
That was enough. A sacred quorum.
I didn’t sing at her funeral. We didn’t play it either.
That space belonged to Elvis—his voice the one that ushered her gently toward whatever lay next.
These were the songs she had always wanted.
We let him serenade her into the arms of the angels.
But we did slip something into the coffin:
The iPod, still cued to the recording.
A photograph of us, all of us, bathed in the warmth of that shared moment.
Our little church.
A makeshift altar.
A communion not bound by stone or liturgy,
but by breath, memory, song. And love.
If we were wrapped in the kind of quiet that follows tears, I might ask: when was the last time love made you speak a language you didn’t know you knew?
I’ve placed the recording of this song just below—for paid patrons—as a soft offering.
A quiet gesture of thanks. It’s not meant to exclude those who read with devotion, freely & often—you are a deeply cherished part of this Often, & Otherwise community. But this is a tender recording. Raw in places. A little breathless. A lot brave.
It’s a fragment of something sacred.
It felt right to rest it here, where the listening is a little more intimate. Where the circle, though much smaller, holds a candle lit. For my aunt. For the girl I was. For anyone who has ever sung through saltwater, when the words would no longer come.