" I wasn't frightened," he said, "but the sudden deafness has been described as ear-stroke and, as I had spent most of my life touring, I accepted it philosophically and began to realise that I had better things to be doing."

The Who singer Roger Daltrey has also admitted he is going deaf after fronting one of the world's loudest rock bands and says his hearing was worn away by excessive volume on stage. His fellow bandsman Pete Townsend is also claiming that high-decibel rock has damaged his hearing irrevocably and puts the blame on the headphones worn during recording sessions.

The possibility of a life of silence may seem terrifying to professional musicians, but, as all deafened folk soon discover, the helplessness and hurt at becoming unable to appreciate sound is soon dwarfed by the way in which deafness plays havoc with our social lives and changes the whole way we are regarded by society.

Collins has found that a hearing aid only magnifies the buzzing in his left ear and at dinner parties he has to tilt his head and really concentrate to understand the conversation. All deafened people can empathise with this: we can usually manage a one-to-one chat if the person is patient and approachable, but when others join in, and the tête-à-tête becomes general, we lose the thread and quietly drop out.

During a visit to Altnagelvin hospital some years ago I was shown a greatly enlarged model of the interior of the human ear and watched in fascination as the specialist demonstrated how the multitude of small hairs in the ear swayed in response to sound and how these movements transferred messages to the brain.

The tiny hairs bend up and down in normal conversation and can last a lifetime of normal use, but very loud music creates a veritable hurricane of sound that may blow the hairs flat to the eardrum and destroy the elasticity that is essential to their efficiency. A gunshot near the ear can produce the same effect - and working near noisy machinery.

But infection and illness also play their part and there are hundreds of ways the hearing can be destroyed in later life It could be argued that no other affliction disables us so much or produces so many obstacles to our previous quality of life. Deafness affects us emotionally, socially and educationally and no matter how hard we try to hold on to some resemblance of normality things never seem the same.

People who are born deaf don't experience this problem, as music is an unknown quantity to them and sign language is their language of choice. Deafened people like me are often unreasonably embarrassed about our hearing loss and are reluctant to try alternative ways of overcoming the communication barrier.

It is a strange transition from the world of sound to the world of deafness and this applies all the more poignantly to those for whom music is dearer even than speech. As Vicram Seth says in the note to An Equal Music: '? thanks to those who have helped me to go where imagination alone would not have taken me: to get some sense of what it might be like to live in the zones that lie at the intersection of the world of soundlessness with those of heard, of misheard, of half-heard and of imagined sound'.

By Bob McCullough
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/features/story.jsp?story=683763