Hearing impaired since she was three, Lindsey Dryden has loved music for as long as she can remember. “I never found it was a problem,” she says of her deafness in one ear, due to Meniere’s disease. “You learn to adapt in ways you don’t even notice.”
Three years ago, Dryden, who works as a television documentary filmmaker in London, began to experience more dizziness than usual. A few weeks of “reeling around,” as she put it in a recent conversation, got her thinking what it would be like if she lost the rest of her hearing.
Thinking turned to action as Dryden started talking to other people, especially musicians, with hearing deficits. She interviewed neurologists and neuroscientists and attended a 2009 conference on “The Musical Brain.”
As Dryden went deeper into the subject of music and hearing loss, she opened doors into “these incredibly different ways of thinking about sound. If music isn’t just sound,” she wondered, “what else could it be?”
The result of all her probing is Lost and Sound, a thoughtful, nuanced and movingly resonant documentary that screened at the Napa Valley Film Festival. The movie is playing the festival circuit. It deserves a wide general audience.
Lost and Sound website.
