Inside the hearing machine

“You do hear better when you bring your head under this machine, don’t you?,” André Stein asked Beethoven, in reference to the Gehörmaschine he had built in 1820 to go on top of Beethoven’s Broadwood piano. Two centuries later, we too can bring our heads under the machine and wonder: Do we hear Beethoven differently? This recording invites us inside the hearing machine—the multisensory playground of the deaf composer for whom the machine was more than a mere hearing aid.