The first thing that rang alarm bells – almost literally – for Chris Singleton was a strange feeling of fullness in his left ear. "It felt a bit like when you come out of a swimming pool and your ears get clogged up. It gradually worsened until I actually felt physical pain in my ear when I heard certain sounds. But the day I flushed the loo and it sounded as loud as a pneumatic drill I realised something was seriously wrong."
For Chris, a musician, the idea of a problem with his hearing was quite terrifying. Music was his life and the only way he could earn a living. If his hearing was affected it could spell the end of his career. High-pitched noises affected Chris most. "Everyday sounds like an expresso machine, squeaky brakes on a car or the clattering of plates would make me wince with pain. The nightmare for me was that music started to be painful too. The higher the frequency the worse the pain and if anything got beyond a certain volume my ears really started to hurt. This was all going on while in the middle of recording my first album, so I was spending a lot of time in the studio trying to mix it and yet most of the time I was in terrible pain. Needless to say the album sounded awful!" he says.
These strange distortions of sound began in 2004, when Chris was 26. He had never suffered any problems with his hearing as a child and there was no his-tory of ear problems in his family. Initially, Chris thought it might be an ear infection and he went to see his GP. "He thought I might have a tiny perforation in the ear and I was prescribed antibiotics. But the problem persisted and I soon began to avoid sounds which caused me pain. So, for example, when I got on a train I would find a seat as far as possible away from the loudspeakers. Social situations started to become difficult and bars and clubs were a no-go area," explains Chris.
Eventually Chris saw an ear, nose and throat consultant, who ran a battery of hearing tests but could find nothing wrong. "I wasn't really surprised, because of course I could hear only too well. I thought I was going quite mad since there was clearly something wrong but nobody seemed able to come up with a sensible diagnosis. It made me very depressed and extremely ill-tempered to be around. I had just moved in with my girlfriend, so her first experience of me as a partner was this incredibly anxious man who was terrified of sounds. It was a really unhappy time for me."
Chris's "allergy to sound" was ruining his attempts to make it as a serious musician in London. "It's hard enough plugging your musical wares around the big city without having the additional worry of the music causing you actual physical distress," he says. He took to wearing earplugs in everyday situations. "They dulled the sound and made the pain bearable, but I subsequently discovered it was the worst thing to do for this particular condition, because as soon as you take them out the sounds become even louder." Still without a proper diagnosis, Chris scoured the internet for a solution and that's when he discovered his unusual condition actually had a name – hyperacusis.
"I found several websites which mentioned hyperacusis, but they all seemed to have different ideas about how it should be treated. There were treatments such as desensitisation, which meant being subjected to white noise at gradually increasing volumes to readjust your ears to normal sound, but they were extremely expensive and at that time I was pretty broke," he says.
drive from www.independent.co.uk