Portlander Sean Wolfe has been making electronic music off and on under the moniker Salvo Beta for more than three decades. During the pandemic, he started experiencing hearing loss in his right ear and other symptoms such as balance problems and tinnitus, or a ringing sensation in the ear. Wolfe was diagnosed with a kind of rare, noncancerous tumor that, if left untreated, can lead to permanent hearing loss, facial paralysis and worse.
So in October 2024, Wolfe got surgery to not only remove the tumor, but also get a cochlear implant, an electronic device affixed behind the ear that directly stimulates the auditory nerve. Although the surgery was a success, he had months of rehabilitation and adjusting to a new sonic environment. That includes difficulty hearing certain kinds of sounds and experiencing shifts in sound frequencies.
Wolfe says his cochlear implant has opened new creative doors musically. He contributed two new songs to an album of remixes that will be released later this month by Chicago indie rock band Still Machine. Wolfe wants to compose music specifically for people who are hard of hearing, and he’s finishing work on an album of new, original material. He joins us to share his journey as a musician with a cochlear implant.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portlander Sean Wolfe has been making electronic music off and on under the name Salvo Beta for more than three decades. During the pandemic, he started experiencing hearing loss in his right ear, along with other symptoms. He was eventually diagnosed with a non-cancerous tumor, and in October of 2024, he had surgery to not only remove that tumor, but to get a cochlear implant. He is now making music again.
He joins us to talk about how all of that has changed. Sean Wolf, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Sean Wolfe: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: I want to start with part of a song that you made 25 years ago. It is from an album with the title “Abrasive Stuttering.” It’s called “Eating the Last Marshmallow.” Let’s have a listen, then we can talk about it.
Wolfe: All right.
[“Eating the Last Marshmallow” by Salvo Beta (Sean Wolfe) playing – electronic music]
Miller: I have to say, I love the title as a juxtaposition to the industrial noise of this. This is not a fluffy song.
Wolfe: No, that was kind of the tongue in cheek in the naming of it.
Miller: Yeah. What kind of music did you listen to or were you exposed to growing up?
Wolfe: So in my early days, my dad had a really big record collection. The ones that I kind of drawn to Pink Floyd, the Moody Blues and a lot of that British kind of like ‘60, ‘70s rock. But then he also had a section of records such as Kraftwerk, Tomita, Wendy Carlos, so that brought me into learning about synthesized music and so on.
And then as I got into being a teenager, I definitely had a lot of influence from listening to a lot of industrial music, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, so on, and there’s a lot of that scene that was happening in Chicago as well. And then also the burgeoning techno scene that was starting to kind of grow. And I was really heavily influenced when Warp Record artists such as Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and Autechre started coming out. So those are like all of the kind of influences that started driving me in the direction I went.
Miller: That’s all going in and then you started making it yourself. So when did you start making music?
Wolfe: It was probably like in the early ‘90s. I downloaded a program from a BBS. It was called Mod Edit and it was like a kind of software that was originally used to make music for video games, but then it kind of went out into kind of the hobby market where you just kind of put little samples. And you put things … it kind of almost looks like a spreadsheet of numbers that you put in, and it triggered the samples and made these songs. And there’s a whole trading sites, on these BBSs, so it’s like kind of pre-internet days, yeah,
Miller: And you were what, 15, 16 or something, making bedroom music but super electronic, a teenager?
Wolfe: Yeah.
Miller: What was the scene like there in Chicago for people like you who are making Noise Electronica?
Wolfe: It was actually really kind of cool. It was really starting to grow at the time, like the late ‘90s, early 2000s. There were a few different resources. There’s a number of people who were doing record labels such as Hefty Records, and eventually Star Pilot, and a group that was called Endpoint. There is also a club called Danny’s. Every Monday night, they had abstract experimental electronic night that we would all go to and kind of converge on and hang out.
Miller: And it wasn’t a dance club? I still have the “Marshmallow” piece in my head and it’s hard for me to imagine people dancing to it.
Wolfe: It was kind of, yeah … It’s kind of taking my industrial sort of influences and then poking fun at drum and bass as it was kind of coming up at the time. And just also adding a rock element to it, because there were samples from Rob Morgenstein, the drummer from Winger. [He] does the heavy beats in there.
Yeah, it was kind of an interesting time to do that. And Danny’s is a little bar. But they had a little room where they had DJs and artists sometimes play, and then sometimes there’s a funk night that they would do and people would be stomping like crazy there. But sadly, Danny’s ended up closed and it was just recently bulldozed, so it was a little sad bit of history lost in Chicago.
Miller: All right, let’s zoom way forward. You moved to Portland in the 2010s. And then as I noted, in the pandemic, I think early on, you started realizing you were having some hearing problems. What were the first symptoms that you remember experiencing?
Wolfe: I started getting really sharp tinnitus that lasted for more than a few hours. After going to loud music events and I didn’t properly wear earplugs or something, I would have it occasionally – maybe for a few hours. But this was persistent, and it would grow louder and louder in the right ear.
Miller: A ringing in your ear?
Wolfe: Yeah, it was a loud, high-pitched ringing. It was kind of consistent. And it didn’t go away and it was really concerning. I thought it was just me being bad at protecting my ears and listening to music loudly or, I don’t know, any of the other things I’ve done through my lifetime that are maybe not so great for us to do.
Miller: [Laughter] That was the first symptom. What happened after that?
Wolfe: So that kind of progressed. And then at some point, like a year-and-a-half, maybe two years, like late 2021 or early ‘22, I was starting to notice if I put my phone up to my ear, it’s like I can’t hear really well. I have to switch to the other ear. Or if I put on headphones and I would put the one ear on, one ear off, I was like, “oh, I can’t really hear it now.” And that was kind of shocking and I just didn’t know what to do at the time.
Miller: How were you eventually diagnosed with what’s called an acoustic neuroma?
Wolfe: That’s a really kind of crazy and interesting story because my friend from Chicago, Chris, who runs our record label, we had worked together on many projects back when we were in the scene that I was talking about. I started calling some of my friends in late 2021 or 2022, I think just to get in touch with everybody again. Because after the pandemic, I was just kind of lonely. I wanted to reach out to all my old friends in Chicago. I was talking to my friend Jason and he was saying, “oh, Chris has got a tumor in his head, he’s gonna get surgery and he’s gonna lose his hearing in his right ear.” I’m like, oh, that’s terrible. I guess I shouldn’t be concerned about my hearing issues because his obviously is much worse. He’s got to get invasive surgery.
And then at some point, I started thinking more about this and I started talking to … I have a psychiatrist that I see and I started talking to her about how I was concerned about that. And she said, “OK, let’s try and figure this out.” And I thought maybe either my medications were doing it or some other sort of things. She did a bunch of research and she said there’s some evidence, but it mostly affects children. Or there wasn’t enough evidence there to really suggest anything. So she said, “go to Costco, you get a free hearing test if you have a Costco membership.”
I went there. My chart in the right ear got to 500 hertz and then it just drops off. And then they have a word score. They try to see if you understand language. And they had to mask my left ear with a bunch of noise, so that I wouldn’t hear through my head. And then I got a score of 24%, which is considered non-functional hearing.
And then I went to Chicago to visit my friends. I talked to my friend Chris, who went through the operation, who had the same condition. And I said, yeah … He kind of told me about everything he went through. Then I showed him my audiogram. He’s like, that’s really interesting that that asymmetry, that one ear is so intensely falling off than the other one. That looks exactly like mine. So when you get back home, maybe you should see about getting an MRI. And when I did, I talked to my psychiatrist and she said let’s get an MRI.
Miller: Not at Costco, hopefully.
Wolfe: [Laughs] No, no, no, it was at The Oregon Clinic. And that was in the morning. Then in the afternoon, they sent an email that says we got the results and it was on MyChart. I could log in, I could see the report, but it was in doctor-ese. I called up my friend Chris, [who] was the first person I called, and said, “What is this?” It was something like “an enhancing mass in the vestibular canal” or something. It’s like, is that it? Is that it? And he’s like, “yeah, that’s the exact language that they said on my report when they diagnosed me. So that’s likely it.”
And that was me learning that, OK … It was interesting because at the time, I actually kind of felt a little relieved because now I know what was causing my hearing loss. But now it’s like I have to go and figure out what to do next.
Miller: And eventually what you did, as I mentioned briefly in my intro, is you had that surgically removed and made the decision that when that was going to happen … which was going to, if I understand correctly, destroy remaining hearing in that ear. You made a decision to also have a cochlear implant put in.
I want to play another song that I understand you made right before you actually had that surgery. It’s called “Monorial Lamental.”I may have mispronounced that.
Wolfe: Yeah, it’s kind of just a mashing of words to talk about what was going on.
Miller: Well, before we listen to it, what should we know about this song?
Wolfe: A few days before I was about to jump on a plane to go to San Diego to get my head cracked open, I was like, this might be the last chance that I’m gonna hear in whatever capacity, or be able to make music, or at least be able to do it for a long time if I’m in recovery. So I was like, I need to go to my studio. I drove into my studio and I just spent the whole evening coming up with something. And it just started with the opening bits and then it all came together that evening.
Miller: Let’s have a listen.
[“Monorial Lamental” by Salvo Beta (Sean Wolfe) playing – electronic music]
Miller: Can you describe the sensation of waking up from the surgery and experiencing sound through the cochlear implant in your right side for the very first time?
Wolfe: The cochlear implant wasn’t activated until a week after the surgery. And then that was kind of a weird waiting period because they didn’t know if there was enough survivable nerve left that the cochlear implant would work. So, I just had a bunch of noise and nothing on the right ear. And on top of it, I had vertigo because they had to cut the vestibular nerve, which helps you keep your balance and so on. So I had to go through a whole period of rehab to retrain that.
Then a week later, we’re still in San Diego. We go to the office to get the cochlear implant turned on and it was like, white knuckled. And then all of a sudden, I started hearing beeps and they went through each different … So there’s little electrodes and each electrode does a different band, and then they just triggered each one. There is a possibility that maybe I’d only hear some of them. But it ended up that all 16 worked.
And then my wife had to go around the corner. They blocked my ear and she said some nonsense sentences. I was able to hear her through the cochlear implant. It was interesting, but everybody’s voices sounded sort of mechanical and pitched up, like me-me-me [speaks in high pitch], kind of like smurfs, chipmunks or something.
Miller: Do I sound like a Smurf to you right now?
Wolfe: The fact that I’m listening with both ears, it kind of helps me translate it. But if I was to listen to it, I think I can hear your voice. But because I’ve seen you and I’ve seen you talk, I’m now able to do it. If I was just to listen through my ear…
Miller: Through your right ear?
Wolfe: … through my cochlear implants, I could stream through my phone to it and I would be able to … Now that I’ve seen you, I know how you talk. It kind of helps my brain start to translate that pitch into what I perceive it. It seems to be easier for me to identify male voices than female voices, but it’s a progress. It’s been getting better over the years.
Miller: Well, for people who haven’t experienced it, how do you describe just the sensation of a cochlear implant? I should say it’s very different technology than a hearing aid, which is a little tiny amplifier, a microphone and an amplifier. It’s a tiny little speaker. This is taking electrical impulses going directly to a nerve.
Can you describe the sensation for those of us who don’t have one?
Wolfe: I have to say that it definitely feels electronic. Especially when you first get it, your ears are really sensitive to this, especially if you haven’t been hearing for a while. And it gets the sensation. It’s like, oh, it’s kind of a shock and it kind of maybe initially feels like shocking. So when they start out….
Miller: You mean literally like a shock – not surprising, but an unpleasant sensation like an electrical shock.
Wolfe: It can be. There was some concern and then I had some kind of post-complications – very minor, very minor ones. Then there was a point in which there was worry that maybe the electrode was a little too far out of the canal and it was starting to maybe make a nerve in my throat kind of zap a little bit. But I wouldn’t say it’s like zapping it, but definitely early on … because they start out really quiet and as you adjust to it, they start making it louder and louder, as you keep going and getting adjustments from the audiologist.
But it takes a while to understand the different sounds that you’re hearing and just starting to adapt to it. And there’s training that you could go through to especially understand speech and so on.
Miller: I want to turn to music making now. One of the things that you’ve done recently is do some remixes. So first, let’s listen to a part of an original song by a Chicago band called Still Machine. Then we’ll hear your remix. So the original is called “Echoes Within.”
[“Echoes Within” by Still Machine playing]
Miller: OK, so that is “Echoes Within” by the band Still Machine. Let’s hear part of your remix, which you called “Hegemonic Containment.”
[“Hegemonic Containment” by Salvo Beta (Sean Wolfe) playing – remix of “Echoes Within”]
Miller: I noted that the song has a different remix. It’s not just the same name and then “Salvo Beta remix.” You call it “Hegemonic Containment.” What does that name come from?
Wolfe: Well, as I was deciding to start working on the remix project – and this is the first thing that I started working on after having the surgery and having the CI – I was going through the individual tracks and I was just kind of playing the lyrics. And I was like, this is kind of weird, “demonic basements?” I don’t know, I couldn’t really … And then my wife is like, “did he just say hegemonic debasement?” I went back and reverted. I’m like, “sure enough, he did.”
That was, I thought, an interesting and quirky lyric, so I just kind of latched on to that. And then there’s a separate part where he says “epistemic containment” and those two phrases mashing together is “Hegemonic Containment,” [which] was a fun thing to say.
Miller: Does that happen in life? Some mishearings, as the CI doesn’t quite give you what people said?
Wolfe: Oh yeah, the other day my wife was talking to one of the AI chatbots and she was telling me like, “oh, I was talking to the LLMs,” and then I said, “who are the yellow men?”
Miller: Oh, as opposed to a large language model? [Laughter]
Wolfe: Yeah, it means LLM. “Yellow men” is what I heard. So that joke’s kind of stuck with us.
Miller: We started by hearing a song from 25 years ago. I want to hear one more because I’m fascinated by how music making has changed. So this is what we’re gonna hear. It’s a song called “Curl,” again from that 2001 album “Abrasive Stuttering.” This is part of “Curl.”
[“Curl” by Salvo Beta (Sean Wolfe) playing – electronic music]
Miller: What’s it like to hear this now 25 years later?
Wolfe: It’s fun. It’s weird. And then I’m hearing those little growls, and that was actually me making sounds and then adding them on. But yeah, it still sounds fun even though at that time it was very primitively put together. It was literally just constructed cut-and-paste style with sample loops that I found or generated.
Miller: How is your process now different?
Wolfe: It’s changed a lot. Back then I focused much more on rhythm, rhythmic patterns, rhythmic textures and sound textures. And now I’m definitely adding a lot more melodic content. I’m working on more complex rhythms, and even time signatures and stuff. I do some repeating and looping sort of stuff when it makes sense, and then other times doing stuff that is all over the place.
Also, I have a lot more equipment than I did back then, so I’m able to use synthesizers and all kinds of gear to generate my sounds, rather than finding these little loops and pasting them together.
Miller: We’re going to listen to one more track. This is from your upcoming album, which I think is going to be released sometime in the summer. We’re going to hear a song called “FM Acid.” What should we listen for in this track?
Wolfe: I think the thing that was really interesting is I did make this song before I had the operation and the CI, but I was losing my hearing at the time. But after I was working on it, I listened to it straight into my CI and like, oh, this actually sounds really good. And the thing that I liked about it is that I could distinctly hear each of the different synth parts and how there’s enough space for them to let each of them kind of like have their voice and a moment to shine, even when they’re really quiet
Miller: Because a density or a layering of sounds is hard for you to pick out; it’s hard for you to distinguish those sounds?
Wolfe: Yeah, if there’s a lot of heavy guitar over vocals, it’s hard for me to distinguish vocals from guitars and drums. It just kind of becomes kind of a jumble. But with these distinct, brief electronic sounds, I could actually hear them individually in the CI.
Miller: This is “FM Acid.”
[“FM Acid” by Salvo Beta (Sean Wolfe) playing – electronic music]
Miller: As you’re listening to music right now – you’re wearing headphones on both ears – do you experience what your brain is doing? Because on the left side where you still, as I understand, have some tinnitus, there might be some ringing. On the right side, [there] is a cochlear implant, [a] totally different way to bring the audio into your brain. But both sides are taking music in at the same time. And then what is it like? What’s happening in your brain as those two different versions of sound are analyzed and turned into some sensation?
Wolfe: Yeah, I think this is the thing that we’re all starting to learn a lot about is neuroplasticity. I hear one thing in my cochlear implant and I hear the natural sounds on the other. And then it’s kind of like my brain’s having to try to marry those two sounds, those two, I guess images of sound together and then interpret it.
In the beginning, it was very, I don’t want to say conflicting, but it was a stark difference. And now, through a lot of just listening, practice, training and so on, it starts to really come together. And it’s interesting because even with our eyes, we still also listen with our eyes when we see people speak with their mouths and where we see where the sounds are coming from. Our brain is trying to take all that information to make a bigger picture and I think that’s kind of what’s happening here.
Miller: How much do you think about creating music now for people who, like you, have cochlear implants?
Wolfe: After going through this process and then hearing some of the songs that you just played, they sound distinctly interesting and different, and that kind of gave me an idea that there could be an avenue to explore making music that’s distinctly designed for people who have cochlear implants. It will be challenging, though, because even I have my experience of cochlear implant, it’s probably gonna be completely different than another person’s because of the placement, how good their nerves are, the different brand of CI that they have. But I think I could approach something that could be pleasing to an audience of CI listeners.
Miller: We heard two songs from your upcoming album. When is the album gonna drop?
Wolfe: So the remix record is gonna be coming out April 24. Our single from my two songs just launched this Tuesday, on the 7. They’re available on Bandcamp and we have a music video on YouTube. The full length, we don’t know yet. We’re thinking maybe late summer, so it’s just got finished mastering. We gotta go through a manufacturing and all the other stuff that has to happen beforehand.
Miller: Sean Wolfe, thanks so much.
Wolfe: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: Sean Wolfe is a Portland-based electronic musician who performs as Salvo Beta.
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