My Story
Check Out This Awesome Video On Why Cochlear Implant Users Can’t Hear Music Well
Kudos to Hearing Review for catching this awesome video of a TED conference talk on why cochlear implant users can’t hear music well. This one hits home for me, because when I lost most of my hearing nine years ago, music suddenly became a discordant jumble of noise that was impossible to enjoy any more. Now I find it’s exactly what cochlear implantees experience.
Dr. Charles Limb describes how devastating the loss of music can be to his cochlear implant patients while explaining in layman’s terms why it happens. As both a musician and a cochlear implant surgeon, he combines his two passions to study the way the brain creates and perceives music. He is an Associate Professor, Otolaryngology, Head & Neck Surgery, at Johns Hopkins who performs cochlear implantations on patients who have lost their hearing. He is also an accomplished musician on the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory of Music who plays sax, piano and bass.
If you listen to the comparison on the video between “normal” symphonic music and an estimation of what people with cochlear implants hear, you will understand the problem better. Cochlear implantees can’t hear the difference–both sound equally bad (I can’t hear the difference either).
To Appreciate Music, You Need To Discern A Much Wider Range Of Frequencies And Amplification Than To Understand Speech
Part of the problem is that neither cochlear implants nor hearing aids are optimized as much for music as for speech. The chart that Dr. Limb displays shows the frequencies and sound levels you need to replicate or amplify for speech, versus the much wider range of frequencies required to convey the richness of music.
But the problem also extends to the brain’s ability to process sound as both music and speech, including the emotional impact music can have. Dr. Limb is fascinated with the idea “that acoustic vibrations in the air can make you feel deep emotion, something that can affect your life.” Music requires a comprehension of pitch, tone and timbre, but cochlear implantees, and people like me with certain kinds of hearing damage, can’t discern warmth in a tone or the timbre of a violin versus a trumpet–qualities that enable music to stir powerful emotions.
The interaction between the mechanical hearing functions and how the brain processes sound and music still is not very well understood. Sound waves are shaped within the ear canal and transmitted through the ear drum and middle-ear bones to the hearing-hair-cell nerves in the cochlea, where they are transformed into electrical impulses carried by the auditory nerve. But then the brain takes over and interprets those sound waves, understanding them as speech, music, a baby’s chatter or cry, random noise or other sounds.
Readers of Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks will be familiar with the mysteries of how the brain processes sound. I found some comfort in the research the book reviewed on the brain’s amazing ability to rewire itself to improve its comprehension of audio inputs after the hearing organs have been damaged. In one of his case histories (and to a lesser degree in my own experience), the brain is able to improve its comprehension of speech over time, and to a lesser extent music as well–to fill in the gaps when the hearing organs are malfunctioning.
But as Dr. Limb makes clear, a lot more is unknown than known at this point. How the brain processes and discerns the quality of music — pitch, tone and timbre — is relatively new territory for researchers. While cochlear implants (and hearing aids) have been wildly successful in restoring the ability of the deaf to hear and understand speech, there’s still a long way to go before they can restore a complete ability to appreciate music.
“If you had a sense to lose, we are furthest along medically and surgically with hearing,” says Dr. Limb, but he adds, “Most implant users really struggle and dislike music because it sounds so bad. So when it comes to this idea of restoring beauty to somebody’s life, we have a long way to go.”
Hearing Mojo 2012: My Search For A New Pair Of Hearing Aids Plus A Quest To Understand The World’s Most Mystifying Business
I took a few months away from Hearing Mojo this year for a few reasons. A death in the family, some time-consuming technical web hosting issues that nearly crashed my site for good, and a busy stretch with my other consulting activities all made it difficult to keep my focus on the hearing aid business. But I’m back on the case now and excited about 2012.
I think most readers with hearing loss should be able to relate to my two immediate goals:
- My old America Hears hearing aids, which have served me extremely well, are wearing out after nearly four years of use. In 2012 I will conduct a disciplined search for a new pair of high end hearing aids. The search will include comparison shopping. Writing about this extended shopping expedition should be fun and illuminating.
- As I shop for hearing aids I will be striving for a deeper understanding of the world’s most mystifying business. I’ve been writing about hearing products and technology for more than six years, as well as about how I cope with hearing loss. In 2012, I will start writing more about how the hearing aid industry works (and doesn’t work). Wouldn’t it be nice to find some answers to that question everyone asks: “Why don’t the tens of millions of consumers who need hearing assistance (more than 30 million in the U.S. alone) have more products to choose from, at a broader range of price points, from a bigger competitive field than five or six global manufacturers?”
So, I’m excited about 2012 and expect to write a lot more than I did in 2011.
A note about my technical problems: last year I set up a hearing aid comparison chart showing the flagship products of the top six global manufacturers. It quickly became one of the most popular attractions on Hearing Mojo. Unfortunately, the WordPress plug-in I used to create the chart crashed my site. (Google the phrase WordPress White Screen of Death and you will get an idea of the extent of the problem).
I finally got the site up and running again, without the chart, and am revamping my approach to hosting and managing what has become a much bigger production than the small blog I started six years ago. I hope to make Hearing Mojo even bigger and better in 2012, and I will revive the product comparison chart(s) once I’ve sorted out the technical issues.
Stay tuned!
It’s About Time: Entire 2011 Super Bowl Broadcast AND All Its Advertisements Will Have Closed Captioning
After years of intense lobbying by the entire hard-of-hearing community, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) has gotten a commitment from the National Football League (NFL) and FOX Broadcasting to provide closed captions for the entire Super Bowl XLV broadcast this Sunday—including all advertisements that will be aired.
Everyone knows the Super Bowl is more than a football game. In fact, in the Madison Avenue circles where I used to move, it’s more a Super Bowl of advertising than an athletic contest. It’s where the most creative minds in media and entertainment show off their best and brightest ideas every year. That’s why when I lost most of my hearing, it enraged me that so few of the ads had captions. Read more
Back in Business, After a Long Break
Re-Booting Hearing Mojo
I’ve been letting people know I’m re-booting my Hearing Mojo hearing-loss blog after having taken a long break from posting new entries. In the past year I’ve let this blog lie dormant as I’ve gone completely “mainstream” with my communications consulting business, Aquarius Advisers. We have been successful, with a number of happy high-technology clients, but it’s been an education in coping with hearing loss in the business world. During my blogging hiatus, I’ve stayed current with the new developments in the world of hearing loss and hearing aids, including time spent consulting with America Hears, Inc., the leading online manufacturer and marketer of premium digital hearing aids. However, I’ve sorely missed writing about this industry and all the issues involved with it, so I intend to start doing so again. I’m still managing a transition to a new blogging platform (the new look and feel are enabled by the WordPress open-source content management system, as opposed to the Moveable Type platform I used in the past). So it might take me a while to get the new platform exposed to the search engines. But I’m starting to write again as of now. A lot has happened in my absence, and I intend to catch people up with all I’ve seen and heard, starting with my visit earlier this month to the American Academy of Audiology (AAA) AudiologyNow 2009 conference.
Can “Musicophilia” by Oliver Sacks Explain Why I’m Hearing Better?
I just picked up Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks, and it is a revelation for anyone with hearing loss and distortion of sounds that comes with it. Sacks is a physician and neurological specialist who has written extensively on previously unexplained phenomena with the brain. Read more
Joining The Hearing Mainstream, Or, How I Got My Mojo Back (Hearing Mojo, That Is)
It’s been a long while since I last posted. That’s because I have spent the last six months ramping my marketing and communications consulting business, Aquarius Advisers, to the next level. Read more
Did Someone Say Those Noises In My Head Are Real? Or Am I Hearing Things Again?
A few weeks ago I posted an item about the noises I constantly hear in my head. These aren’t the usual hissing or ringing noises commonly associated with tinnitus. I’m talking about distinct sounds such as dump trucks and payloaders working at a hallucinatory construction site outside my window, a chain saw whining in the distance, several orchestral arrangements of “God Bless America” that played in my head without a break for two full days…. the list of real sounds heard distinctly goes on. Read more
Okay, It’s Time To Get A Portable Bed-Shaker. Any Recommendations?
When my family toured Washington, D.C., in 1964, we stayed in a Holiday Inn where one of the beds was equipped with something called “Magic Fingers.” My brother and I scraped together two quarters and shoved them into the sliding arm that dropped the coins into a metal box above the headboard, and the entire bed started vibrating. Read more
