The first thing I noticed when I put in the earplugs was how everything, all of sudden became faint. It was not that it just became quiet but it seemed that everything that I heard was more like an echo. Throughout the day, I felt that whatever sound I did hear was more internalized than it had been before.
While driving into Boston to my dance studio, I realized that how much I took hearing for granted while driving. I am the type of driver who does five things at the same time and can allow my eyes to wander for a few seconds here or there because my other sense, sound, will help me out. However, that was not the case. I realized that I used my sense of hearing when judging how close or far away cars were. In fact, it took me a longer time to take turns and I found myself breaking before I intended on breaking because my perception of depth seemed to be altered, also.
The most interesting part of the day was when I was at the dance studio. Initially, we used a portable studio to practice, which was not hooked up to the surround sound system. The music was audible, however; I did not hear it, as I was accustomed to. I seemed to hear the louder sounds like the bass section. The music and the other sections of the songs seemed to die out in comparison to the louder sounds. It seemed that the sounds with the highest frequency were the ones that I tended to hear as normally as possible.
This made it difficult to dance to the music, because I rely on all the different parts of the music to execute my dance moves. The rest of the music sounded like echoes and in some way was muffled. Since, it sounded like an echo; it also seemed that a lot of the music was more internalized. This is possibly because it did not sound so sharp and focused and yet was faint, so I thought that it was coming from somewhere within. So, I missed a lot of the crucial dance moves and I missed times when I was supposed to start o stop because I could not accurately hear those parts of the song.
Every action I did that resulted in a sound seemed muffled, however for some weird reason if felt as if it was actually closer to me than it really was. When I clapped during the dance moves, the noise sounded like a blur however it felt as if it was much closer than it actually was. Whenever I jumped or hit the ground, the sound seemed stronger because again it felt as if it was much closer to my ears than it actually was. The tap dances I did were absolutely horrible. Every tap, I made sounded muffled yet it had more of a surround sound to it. It felt as if it was all around me and that the actually thump felt that it was stressed to a higher extreme. After doing a set of turns it seemed that I felt dizzier than usual, and of course it did not help when all the sounds around me were just as muffled as the spinning sensation in my head and vision. I think the lack of clarity in both my hearing and vision had something to do with the increase of dizziness that I was experiencing. In addition, I found myself underestimating the room that I had between individuals in the dances, so I found myself bumping into people or hitting objects that were still a few times. It seemed that gracefulness and elegance that I had in dance was lost and I dancing more like a monkey.
It also seemed that, the beats that I was counting or the song that I was singing along to, while doing the dance, seemed to be stronger and louder and even more enunciated then the rest of the sounds. Again, it felt as if I was internalizing these sounds more than any other sounds, and it felt that these sounds were coming from somewhere within me, even though it was not as sharp as I expected.
This was my day. The reason why I think that many of the sounds seemed internalized was because these were the sounds that most likely had the highest frequency because they were either very loud or very close to me. Therefore the sounds did not have to travel through a lot of external medium. This allowed them to preserve the volume of their sound, so they sounded stronger to me. Since a lot of the sounds were weaker and more muffled, the sounds that I could hear clearer and the ones that were closer to me were perceived to be closer to me and this could be the reason why I interpreted many of the sounds that I did hear quite well to be internalized.