Nick Coleman wrote a great article about his experience of sudden hearing loss and its impact on his love for music. I especially like this passage, which talks about that weird sensation of music being a field and not a line:
Speaking for myself, I used to hear "buildings"... three-dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. I did not "see" these buildings in the classic synaesthetic way so much as sense them. These forms had "floors", "walls", "roofs", "windows", "cellars". They expressed volume. Music to me has always been a handsome three-dimensional container, a vessel, as real in its way as a Scout hut or a cathedral or a ship, with an inside and an outside and subdivided internal spaces.
In contrast:
What I hear now when I listen to music is a flat, two-dimensional
representation. Where I used to get buildings, I now only get
architectural drawings. I can interpret what the drawings show, but I
don't get the actual structure: I can't enter music and I can't
perceive its inner spaces. I've never got much of an emotional hit from
technical drawings. Here is what really hurts: I no longer respond to
music emotionally.
