Blue O'Connell's tunes are worth hearing

First, she had to get past the cartoon voices. People who spoke to Blue O’Connell initially sounded as if either they’d been breathing helium out of balloons, or were doing their best Darth Vader impressions.

Then, as O’Connell sat in the break room at work during lunch, she had to learn how to sort through a jumble of competing noises — the whirring of the refrigerator, the clink of dishes being washed in the sink, the hum of the air conditioner, friendly banter, laughter. Only then could she decide which sounds to tune out and which ones deserved her focus.

Then, the singer-songwriter and former DJ who serves as a certified music practitioner at the University of Virginia Hospital had to learn to hear music all over again and find the answer to the question she’d been dreading:

Now that she’d had her cochlear implant, would the musical life she cherished come back?

“No one could tell me whether the implant would interfere with music perception,” O’Connell said. “It’s not known for being good for music; it’s really a speech processor.

“Music sounded really strange at first, but it got better over time. Over time, gradually, it came back to me. I had to train my brain to listen to those frequencies.

“But I could hear all the notes on my guitar — every fret.”

O’Connell will take the stage Sunday evening at the Haven at First and Market. She and fellow songwriter Mary Gordon Hall will open the show for Anne Hills and David Roth as part of a benefit for the Thomas Jefferson Coalition for the Homeless. And she’s got so much to share that she can’t wait.

“This is going to be a big thing for me, because it’s like my first time back,” O’Connell said. “It’s almost a homecoming concert.”

Before O’Connell received her cochlear implant two years ago, she’d been losing her hearing bit by bit. So gradually, in fact, that she didn’t realize how serious it had become.

“It was like being in a foreign country. I could understand maybe one out of five words,” she said. “For many years, I didn’t hear a lot of frequencies.”

It meant that an increasing number of notes were off limits on her guitar. People would come up to her after performances and speak to her, and she had no idea what they were saying. Then she completely lost the ability to hear a soft-spoken co-worker, so she’d just smile when her friend spoke to her.

O’Connell said she had no idea how much her hearing had disintegrated until a new friend spoke up after a frustrating conversation at the water’s edge.

“She said she’d tried to speak to me, but the waves were so loud I couldn’t hear her,” O’Connell said. “I was kind of in a lot of denial in my life about my hearing.”

After O’Connell ran into an old friend who’d had an implant, “that planted a seed in my mind,” she said.

“At this point, I thought, ‘I can’t communicate with people. I’ve got to do something,’ ’’ she said.

The resulting din after a cochlear implant sometimes frustrates people into switching off the device and even their hearing aids. It can take months of work to learn to hear familiar sounds in their new forms and not be put off by them, especially if perception of particular frequencies and pitches has been absent for years. O’Connell, who plays therapeutic music for patients for a living, had to commit to rigorous therapy herself to make sense of all the bewildering new sounds.

“I had to go through that initial noisy time,” O’Connell said. “There are days when there’s a lot of noise.”

O’Connell’s hearing homework took up to two hours a day. At one point, she’d listen to recordings of the alphabet for 30 minutes at a stretch, letting the sounds bounce around until they became second nature again.

She’s still fine-tuning the interplay between her cochlear implant and her hearing aid, but she has learned how to filter out background noises in crowded situations and accept the subtle differences in familiar sounds.

The water fountain has a new metallic sound, for instance. Her classical guitar with its nylon strings has more of an electric-guitar sound to her ears now — and she loves it.

“Music isn’t only about hearing with your ears,” O’Connell said. “There’s a resonance thing, too. You can feel it with your body.” Her example? Feeling the thump of the bass long before a car drives past with a cranked-up sound system.

Some sounds that have returned feel like old friends. O’Connell said she’d had no idea how much she missed the sound of wind rustling through the trees.

One joyful moment came when O’Connell was indoors and realized that she could hear birds singing outside. Only months before, she could be standing outdoors and not hear a single chirp.

“I will never take sounds for granted again,” she said.

That’s why O’Connell’s hard at work on “Choose the Sky,” her first album in almost 20 years. She recently thought it was finished and ready to go, but as she keeps making gains with her hearing, she keeps expanding her dreams.

“Now I want to have my friends sing harmony, and I want to have some cello,” she said.

O’Connell is accepting Kickstarter donations for the project at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1866045875/choose-the-sky. To learn more about her music, visit www.blueoconnell.com.