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I come from a musical family. My mother's played piano well into her 90's, I am a semi-professional singer and my daughter, a freshman at Harvard plays viola in two orchestras and sings in a chorus. My mother, although not a musician always loved music and could certainly always carry a tune until, in her 80's she started losing her hearing. It was not just that thing got softer (with or without a hearing aid) or, as is common, that she couldn't pick up one voice among many, but she could no longer hear music as music. It just sounded like noise to her even when there was little or no harmony (She came to a solo recital of my daughter's and told me later that she couldn't hear any of it as music.) What seems even stranger is that she will sometimes find that an hour later, she is humming the tune that she couldn't make sense of at the time, and if I sing a note for her or even an interval, she can sing it back. Are you at all familiar with this syndrome?

(By the way, I've read most of your books and love them; if I were starting over I might well go into neurology instead of physics (although this was before the days of CAT's, MRI's, PET's, etc. Any way, you've given me great pleasure.)