Why Music Is Important To Me

Imagine Driving down the road with the windows down and your favorite song on the radio and everything is just so relaxed. Now Imagine one day you can’t do this anymore. Can you think of something that you love? Now imagine if that thing you loved was taken away or imagine even worse that you never could experience the thing you loved again. I love music. I love the way the notes dance around the lyrics. I love that some music can calm me when I am upset or get me pumpin when I’m jammin out. Music is very important to me. Additionally, I also love being outdoors. Something about the sounds makes me feel relaxed no matter where I am. To think that I could have been born and never knew a lyric, the song of a bird or the sound of a rain storm on a tin roof. To me that would be devastating. I started thinking about the fact that ageing is inevitable and that one day the beautiful melodies and sweet lullabies of the earth would no longer be my escape. I thought how can this be avoided? I may not lose my hearing completely when I am old, but it will deteriorate just like many things on my body will. Then I started thinking about the men, women, and children that can no longer hear due to illness or those that were born deaf. If only there was something that could be done to help these people enjoy the sounds of life again and to find a way that I can maintain this form of escape that I enjoy so much. So I did some research, and came across a hearing device approved by the FDA called a Cochlear implant. How this devices works is it goes to the damaged part of the inner ear and then bypasses it and stimulates sound so that people can hear again (Cochlear Implants 2013). While reading this I thought it was great, I am saved! I will no longer have to worry about this problem I have worried about for so long. But I started thinking, why do we have deaf people if these devices are available? I started doing research and found out that this little implant was a big controversy in the hearing and deaf communities . Although, this seemed like a miracle product to me at the time, further reading lead me to some discomforting discoveries. I found out how the implant is placed, the therapy that is involved and how the implant is threatening the deaf communities numbers (Blume 2010). I also found out that it wasn’t cheap and that sometimes it didn’t work or it wasn’t the same kind of sound that we hear naturally (Medical Devices 2014). I didn’t realize that something so small could have such a large impact.Researching this implant led to a submersion into the deaf community and what they feel on the matter. It also led me to some stories that had happy endings and some that had sad ones. Throughout this research I had posed a few questions to myself. Was this product something I would want to invest in when I got older? Was it worth it to me to have to relearn how to hear? Did it matter that the sound …show more content…
I know that having children is hard and sometimes parents forget things and if you forget your childs charger they have no way of communicating with you unless they know sign language. Most people don’t teach their children sign language because they want their children to be a part of their community and be able to speak and hear and function just like everyone else. There is a long list of programs designed for deaf or hard hearing children (Schools and Programs for Deaf…..United States 2014). These programs offer a range of opportunity to exceed but parents just want their kids to be like everyone else so instead of embracing the different the put them in the schools with everyone else and expect them to function the same way. By doing this they are taking their child away from the support of the deaf community and putting them in the hearing community where they are treated as broken or