Valerie, oh how I sympathize with you. I have developed musical ear over the past year or so, and it is a change that is equal to hearing loss itself in its significance to my quality of life. At first it was what you describe - pieces or snippets of pieces of familiar music that played over and over in my consciousness. Now it has become four- or five-note series of notes that repeat ad nauseam every minute I am awake. I can, if I concentrate very hard, stop it or slow it for a short period of time, and thankfully, if I am very caught up in some other activity, I can ignore it. Once I go back to normal casual attention, however, my awareness of it returns. I hear it whether I am wearing my hearing aids or not.

My audiologist explained it as my brain’s attempt to make up for the ambient sounds it was used to hearing all the time that I can no longer hear. That makes sense to me; nevertheless I find it a debilitating, irritating development. I did read an account of a musician/composer who developed the syndrome and responded to it with curiosity and interest rather than revulsion by listening, recording what he heard, and trying to understand his brain’s creative efforts and using them in his music. For some reason this story helped me come to terms with the condition, although I couldn’t help wondering whether he wasn’t hearing much more compelling musical phrases than I hear all the time!

I do hope work is being done on musical ear’s place in the pantheon of hearing loss phenomena. Programming my hearing aids to play musical notes to distract my brain from creating its own has had no effect on this annoyance in my experience. It may be that nothing other than something that allows us to hear the world’s ambient sounds again will discourage our ever-active brains from trying to give us sound where there is none.