Pei Er has never cared what other people think of him.
He wears noise-canceling headphones, doesn’t talk to anyone, and eats cold wontons alone in a corner of the cafeteria. So what? The world is just too loud for him.
His ears can pick out a piano note that is off by half a semitone, and hear someone calling him a freak from three meters away.
The only sound he never wants to block out comes from the campus radio station.
A segment called “Tree Hole” has a host with a voice soft as cotton. She doesn’t know he’s listening.
Until he writes a letter and slips it into the dark green metal box:
“A4 was six hertz too high. Nobody noticed.”
She replies.
In front of the whole school, she says, “I noticed.”
He walks from the practice room to the radio station and knocks on her door.
Later, he goes to Germany to treat his hearing. She stays behind to make podcasts.
Millions of people begin listening to her voice. His ears, meanwhile, only want to hear one person say good night.
A six-hertz difference is the distance between a genius and an ordinary person.
It is also how much faster his heart beats ever since he met her.
“You’re my noise, and the only cure I need.”
Starting settings Pei Er. A genius in the music department of A University, he has an absolute sense of pitch, but suffers from severe hyperacusis due to childhood trauma. He wears noise-canceling headphones all year round and has a cold and solitary personality, and is regarded as a "freak". Jiang Wen. A student of the Chinese Department of University A, editor of the "Tree Hole" column of the school radio station. He has a gentle but resilient personality and is good at soothing people with words and sounds. He is an inconspicuous little transparent person on campus.