Nick Coleman has found and made his life in music. His father had a keen amateur interest; much of his East Anglian childhood was spent in thrall to successive waves of pop, rock, punk, reggae, and so on; for 25 years he worked as a journalist for the NME. Then he was stricken by sudden sensorineural hearing loss, and was unable to listen to music, or anything, without almost literally writhing in agony. The Train in the Night is his account of this illness, and also a history of the evolving musical life that preceded it. It is often moving, and sad; because Coleman is a spirited person, who writes with an irrepressible Hornby-esque skip in his style, it is also often funny and admirable.

It begins with what seems to be an end: the onset of the illness itself. This means silence, initially, then weird pulsing and humming ("such are the excitements of tinnitus"), then the sensation of being "lullabied by a tiny monkey playing a tiny pipe organ", then "the singing of a drowned choir". Even to read about these things makes us feel queasily unbalanced  and also leads us to believe we're starting a misery memoir. It soon turns out we're slipping into something less predictable: a book that conscientiously introduces hope into hopelessness, and affirmation into despair.

A good deal of the hopelessness is provoked by the very thing that should prevent it: the medical profession, which for the first several months of the illness is practically inert. Coleman gets a miserably vague diagnosis of the problem, precious little advice about how to cope with its effects, and no therapy. While we may fume as we read about this, he remains uncomplaining, and deflects anger into backwards glancing. Because the present is virtually unliveable, this is perhaps not surprising. What is remarkable, though, is the mood of the retrospection  more amused than disappointed.

The fixed points in this process are his father (who ended up with the interesting job of Publishing Director of the Bible and Religious Books at CUP, which required him among other things to "recite the entirety of [the Revised English Bible] in his best lectern voice, twice"), and his best friends Andy and Lorry. Because these two are fellow-travellers on his journey into music, they also provide the framework for many of the book's disquisitions about particular bands and singers.

Occasionally these judgments appear as glancing remarks, while Coleman races from the reminiscence of one enthusiasm to the next. Dylan, for instance, is mentioned only very briefly as someone who knows it is "more useful to conjecture than it is to assimilate facts". More often, they are set-pieces that help to build up the heartland of the book: the longish appreciation of Stevie Wonder is especially good, and so is the mini-essay about Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine", a record that Coleman realises is "an expression of high paranoia".

Coleman's love for music is a means of entering the world, as well as an end in itself. This means a good deal of The Train in the Night (which punctuates its narrative of the past with bulletins about his illness in the near-present) is spent recalling the trials and tribulations of growing up. Because these memories have a generic feel  they concentrate on difficulties with girls  they are less interesting than the musical reminiscences. They are inevitable, perhaps, and certainly embarrassing, but not so intense or original.

This leads to the book's one serious structural problem. As a teenager in Cambridge, Coleman pined after a local girl called Lulu, who seemed indifferent to his adoration, even, or perhaps especially, after he'd drunkenly sent her a postcard admitting his feelings. As a sick adult he describes visiting her in order to exorcise the ghost of his embarrassment. The intention (within the book at least) is to forge a link between childhood pains and adult ones, and somehow to diminish one by extinguishing the other. The trouble is, Lulu by this time seems to the reader to be too inconsequential a figure. The scene in which she returns the offending postcard to Coleman cannot carry the larger emotional significance it is designed to bear.

This is a blemish on the book, but nowhere near spoils it. When, in the final pages, we see Coleman reach the end of his adolescence, and also come up to date with his doctor-visiting, he has drawn us into a web of confidences that make us, to use the sort of idiom he might use himself, pretty damn keen to reach a happy ending. If the book is to be believed, the contentment of post-teenage life has apparently already been well-found  thanks to family and music. And the life to come? After a much longer search than anyone should need to make, Coleman has found treatments and therapies that are in the process of restoring him to music and vica versa. Before closing his account with a long hallelujah of bands he likes, he even says he feels "the quality of my listening" has improved, as a result of his deprivations. It's hard to resist a book that ends by showing so much heart.

 Andrew Motion's The Cinder Path is published by Faber.

What is the opposite of music? Before reading Nick Coleman's affecting memoir, my temptation might have been to suggest unthinkingly that music is the converse of silence. The book leaves you in no doubt, however, that the flipside of music is in fact discordancy, unregulated clamour.

Nick Coleman had been a writer about music for 25 years or more when one morning he woke with sudden neurosensory hearing loss; he was stone deaf in one ear. Even worse, in order to compensate for the abrupt absence of external stimuli, that ear was being bombarded with a cacophony of internal noise, like "the inside of an old fridge hooked up to a half-blown amplifier". Coleman had been cast into the private torment of tinnitus, though that percussionary little word was entirely inappropriate to the savage new aural landscape in which he lived.

His book, an account that begins on the morning of his transformation, is subtitled "A story of music and loss", but his sense of absence is not just for the contents of his four decades of record- and CD-collecting. More pointedly, it is for the silence from which the excitement of those sounds once emerged. Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, Led Zeppelin  they were nothing, he realised, without contrasting quiet. A vacuum of sound  the kind of silence that Coleman had known in his childhood bedroom in a Fenland village near Cambridge, broken by the occasional distant locomotive of the book's title  "became the best thing imaginable".

After the initial concussive shock, Coleman approached the new circumstances of his life  his inner-ear condition not only ruined his hearing but also his balance  with a good deal of the curiosity and wit that once characterised his reviews of albums and gigs in the pages of Time Out and the Independent. His book is not simply an examination of the effects of his relatively rare and bleakly ironic illness but also a broader meditation on mortality and the resourceful defences of memory.

The inability to hear tone and nuance, the frustration and pain of the riot of white noise, had consequences that Coleman had not envisaged. Deafened in his own skull, he found that he not only started to view the person he had become at one remove, but also lost sight of the tastes and judgments that once created him. Disconnected from the soundtrack to his life  Coleman's memory triggers were nearly all auditory  he found that he was also unplugged from the emotional resonance of his past. His memoir details his efforts to restore that soundtrack, to remaster his memory.

The effort begins, appropriately enough, with the Remembrance Day parade at the Cenotaph. Coleman had always been brought to tears by the marching band version of "Nimrod", the televised spectacle of "grey greatcoats, deep trombones and utter stilllness" in the mournful November air. In his new state, he feared even that osmosis of emotion would be denied him. In the event, however, even the anticipation of the music played its usual sensory trick: "Before a single guardsman had so much as licked his mouthpiece I was in a flood of tears." From then on the idea crystallises that if he can no longer listen to records without an unending Jesus and Mary Chain of feedback, he can at least replay them somewhere in the MP3 player of his mind. For Coleman, in particular, the experience of living with music and writing about music had always been a process of self-projection and self-understanding, and now that process had never felt more urgent.

What follows is an autobiography through sound. What Coleman is after is not so much the particular effect a particular piece of music had on him (though he has predictable fun with the formative suburban bildungsroman of prog rock and punk); it is not even a more studied analysis of the ways in which certain pieces demand certain neural responses (though he can deftly deconstruct the emotional syncopation of John Coltrane or the edgy necessity of Marvin Gaye). It is more a question of rebuilding and re-examining a personal history in two-minute, Ramones-intensity energy bursts.

Coleman writes about his former sense of music having an architectural structure, whether modernist block or soaring gothic nave; what he has been left with is more akin to a designer's technical drawing: flat and uninspired. The habits of recollection allow him to re-enter some of those old constructions, however; in place of Proust's madeleine, he has Captain Beefheart and The Basement Tapes.

You have a sense that this book was begun out of therapeutic necessity. It is what gives it its narrative shape, even if it occasionally leads Coleman into quests into his own biography and teenage embarrassments that strain a little for significance. These air guitar moments do not undermine what is generally a tightly constructed solo, however, and one that has persuasive arguments to make, not only about the harmonies of sound and self, but about the ways in which the X-Factoring of popular music undermines those singularities.

One result of download and shuffle culture, Coleman suggests, is that "our tastes need never be exposed". The implications of that fact are doubly felt here: if buying music was once the means by which Coleman announced himself to the world, it has now allowed him to reimagine the man he is.

What is the opposite of music? Before reading Nick Coleman's affecting memoir, my temptation might have been to suggest unthinkingly that music is the converse of silence. The book leaves you in no doubt, however, that the flipside of music is in fact discordancy, unregulated clamour.

Nick Coleman had been a writer about music for 25 years or more when one morning he woke with sudden neurosensory hearing loss; he was stone deaf in one ear. Even worse, in order to compensate for the abrupt absence of external stimuli, that ear was being bombarded with a cacophony of internal noise, like "the inside of an old fridge hooked up to a half-blown amplifier". Coleman had been cast into the private torment of tinnitus, though that percussionary little word was entirely inappropriate to the savage new aural landscape in which he lived.

His book, an account that begins on the morning of his transformation, is subtitled "A story of music and loss", but his sense of absence is not just for the contents of his four decades of record- and CD-collecting. More pointedly, it is for the silence from which the excitement of those sounds once emerged. Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, Led Zeppelin  they were nothing, he realised, without contrasting quiet. A vacuum of sound  the kind of silence that Coleman had known in his childhood bedroom in a Fenland village near Cambridge, broken by the occasional distant locomotive of the book's title  "became the best thing imaginable".

After the initial concussive shock, Coleman approached the new circumstances of his life  his inner-ear condition not only ruined his hearing but also his balance  with a good deal of the curiosity and wit that once characterised his reviews of albums and gigs in the pages of Time Out and the Independent. His book is not simply an examination of the effects of his relatively rare and bleakly ironic illness but also a broader meditation on mortality and the resourceful defences of memory.

The inability to hear tone and nuance, the frustration and pain of the riot of white noise, had consequences that Coleman had not envisaged. Deafened in his own skull, he found that he not only started to view the person he had become at one remove, but also lost sight of the tastes and judgments that once created him. Disconnected from the soundtrack to his life  Coleman's memory triggers were nearly all auditory  he found that he was also unplugged from the emotional resonance of his past. His memoir details his efforts to restore that soundtrack, to remaster his memory.

The effort begins, appropriately enough, with the Remembrance Day parade at the Cenotaph. Coleman had always been brought to tears by the marching band version of "Nimrod", the televised spectacle of "grey greatcoats, deep trombones and utter stilllness" in the mournful November air. In his new state, he feared even that osmosis of emotion would be denied him. In the event, however, even the anticipation of the music played its usual sensory trick: "Before a single guardsman had so much as licked his mouthpiece I was in a flood of tears." From then on the idea crystallises that if he can no longer listen to records without an unending Jesus and Mary Chain of feedback, he can at least replay them somewhere in the MP3 player of his mind. For Coleman, in particular, the experience of living with music and writing about music had always been a process of self-projection and self-understanding, and now that process had never felt more urgent.

What follows is an autobiography through sound. What Coleman is after is not so much the particular effect a particular piece of music had on him (though he has predictable fun with the formative suburban bildungsroman of prog rock and punk); it is not even a more studied analysis of the ways in which certain pieces demand certain neural responses (though he can deftly deconstruct the emotional syncopation of John Coltrane or the edgy necessity of Marvin Gaye). It is more a question of rebuilding and re-examining a personal history in two-minute, Ramones-intensity energy bursts.

Coleman writes about his former sense of music having an architectural structure, whether modernist block or soaring gothic nave; what he has been left with is more akin to a designer's technical drawing: flat and uninspired. The habits of recollection allow him to re-enter some of those old constructions, however; in place of Proust's madeleine, he has Captain Beefheart and The Basement Tapes.

You have a sense that this book was begun out of therapeutic necessity. It is what gives it its narrative shape, even if it occasionally leads Coleman into quests into his own biography and teenage embarrassments that strain a little for significance. These air guitar moments do not undermine what is generally a tightly constructed solo, however, and one that has persuasive arguments to make, not only about the harmonies of sound and self, but about the ways in which the X-Factoring of popular music undermines those singularities.

One result of download and shuffle culture, Coleman suggests, is that "our tastes need never be exposed". The implications of that fact are doubly felt here: if buying music was once the means by which Coleman announced himself to the world, it has now allowed him to reimagine the man he is.