“All of a sudden, I couldn’t teach,” musician Joel Styzens says. “I couldn’t play my gigs. I couldn’t do anything surrounding drums because it was just too uncomfortable.”
The Chicagoan had been a professional drummer for years when he developed tinnitus and severe ear sensitivity, or hyperacusis, in 2006.
‘Relax Your Ears’
“It was very intense, loud ringing, and even my own voice was bothering me at first, and the birds chirping outside, car horns—all of that was just piercing,” Styzens says, sharing details of a “dark mental state.”
Turning to therapy, he began writing acoustic music that was soft and soothing—for him and others. In a matter of months, he had a whole album’s worth of songs.
“(I) started talking more and more to other musicians and started to find out that a lot of other musicians had similar issues, but no one really ever talked about,” Styzens says. “And then as I eventually did the album and released it, I saw that my music could be therapeutic for other people.”
Styzens says making music not in spite of, but because, his diagnosis has led to more conversations and awareness about hearing damage risks. That, and this new way of work helped him find his musical identity.
“It feels like a full circle, kind of like finding home again,” he says.
JAY AFRISANDO, ARTIST“Music to me is no longer just an audio thing, but also visuals, vibration, tactile sensing, text, interrelationships of objects and experiences, and many other things.”
‘See and Feel’
Dr. Tyler Mazone is a Deaf clarinetist, composer, and music teacher in Lansing, Michigan. He recently commissioned a piece with horn player Macy James, who is blind. Parts of the piece are muted and unmuted to convey how disabled musicians can—and cannot—fully express themselves in society.
When creating music, Dr. Mazone hears the different parts in his head. He sees color and characters. He feels the different sounds and tones, especially with lower instruments.
“A lot of musicians have a hard time paying attention to other people’s parts,” he says. “But because of that, I memorize music so well . . . just based off of what I see and feel in the room.”
In the classroom, he’ll have students play not by ear but by finger playing. He’ll help students explore how instruments can be used beyond sound.
“If we gave disabled musicians the tools, they can succeed and be amazing musicians,” Dr. Mazone says.
![Music-theater performance featuring double screen projections, two narrators, one sign language interpreter, and three musicians. The projection shows a blank book page turned with the caption [ticking clock]. The audience is seen watching attentively.](https://artsmidwest.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/opera_captions_AOT_Credits_JayAfrisando-scaled.jpg)
‘Imagination and Memory’
Artist Jay Afrisando focuses his work on exploring aural diversity. Accessibility is at the forefront of it, so aurally divergent listeners who are deaf*, hard-of-hearing, neurodivergent, or blind can access his work.
As a hearing and neurodivergent person, he collaborates often with aurally diverse artists, curators, and culture bearers to turn his creativity into much more than pure sound.
“Music to me is no longer just an audio thing, but also visuals, vibration, tactile sensing, text, interrelationships of objects and experiences, and many other things,” says Afrisando, who lived in the Twin Cities for years before moving to California. “It can also be imagination and memory that emerge differently in different minds, even if we are interacting with the same thing.”
This may look like music-theater, for instance, using captions as actors; or working with tactile notation, sound captions, drawings, and body gestures, including music in sign language. All of this so everyone can enjoy music, regardless of hearing-listening status.
He calls it ethical entertainment.
“Sound can be imagined and music can be embodied,” Afrisando says. “The beautiful thing about it is that music eventually ‘lives’ differently in different senses and minds.”