What music sounds like through an auditory implant | Hacker News Reader

What music sounds like through an auditory implant

theconversation.com

Why do the implants only have 8-22 electrodes?

The cochlear nerve is about 0.2mm thick, which means if mems technology is used to make the electrodes, one could cram over a million in a 1000x1000 grid and still be orders of magnitude from the limits of silicon technology. Using that, there is a very real possibility that a user could end up with super-human hearing.

Either there isn't enough money in implant R&D to justify the use of the latest tech, or delays in medical certification processes are forcing the use of 30 year old technology.

The original IBM PC had a speaker in it, that was driven simply by connecting one lead to an I/O pin and the other to ground. The speaker could be driven only by a square wave. The sound waves were simply converted to a square wave turning the I/O pin on and off.

This hopelessly crude device worked rather amazingly well. Certainly far better than the sound samples in the link. I wonder if that technique could be applied to the implants.

These implants stimulate nerves directly. Nerves aren't good at receiving high frequency information (an individual nerve can't fire much more than 10Hz).

Instead many nerves exist, each representing a specific combination of volume and pitch.

These implants can't precisely target the nerves though, and end up hitting a random selection of nerves. That's the core of the issue.

I've had a cochlear implant since 2002 and always cringe at these kinds of articles because the samples always sound RIDICULOUSLY terrible compared to what I usually hear. Like, NES levels or early PC speaker levels of terrible. I wonder why.

How many electrodes does your implant use?

The demos sound like they only use ~4.

It's the HiRes 90k, so 16, IIRC. They bury the information pretty deep under lots of marketing talk about "virtual channels" and such.

This series of six talks by Graeme Clark the inventor of the cochlear implant gives a good insight into the struggles and hopes of this type of research https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/boyerlectures/...

I set off an alarm recently that triggered much the same auditory effect. Also similar is if I listen to binaural beats for 10 minutes and remove the headphones. I have no idea what's going on there.

I wonder if it’s the audible equivalent of the afterimages you see when you stare at a certain color for a while.

This would explain so much of electronic music. It also makes me wonder if there are any 'movies' of moving color that actually take place solely in the mind, with the aid of the after-images of what has come before?

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