I wouldn't normally describe hearing a voice as hearing "vibrations". Vibrations are indeed the physical basis of sound, and the auditory system detects changes in air pressure caused by them. But vibrations can also be perceived through touch, and the subjective experience of hearing is quite different from the tactile sensation of feeling something vibrate. When talking about feeling vibrations, I usually think of the touching sensation.
Still, both sensations originate from the same physical phenomenon. You can try to feel your own vocal chords vibrate by placing your fingers on your throat while humming. It's certainly a very different sensation, and touch generally conveys fewer acoustic details than typical hearing, but you're sensing the same underlying physical event.
One interesting example is Dani Valeska (Instagram: @daniivaleska), a Brazilian Sign Language interpreter whose husband is deaf (I couldn't find his name). She shares content about their experiences, and I remember seeing a video in which her husband used the vibrations of her voice, felt by touching her throat, to reproduce what she was saying. This resembles a technique called "tactiling", which has been studied as a tactile aid to speechreading (https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/tactiling-a-us...).
ENT surgeon who has bilateral CIs and has been in the research field for 20+ years. This sort of stuff is cool, but there are lots of limitations at the auditory nerve interface that limits improvements to speech and music processing strategies. Crazily enough, many of these studies were done in the 1960s to 1990s and are still valid today. There are strategies that can help at individual level, but do not help everyone. Thus they have not made it to clinical use.
Thanks for posting. If you have time to write some more thoughts on those limits and individual strategies I'm sure it would be interesting to many of us here.
> But I cannot know what sound is really like, because I have no memory of normal hearing.
and
> I was born with normal hearing. I began losing my hearing in childhood ... After I was registered, I started wearing hearing aids. People's voices became clear, and for a few months things were good. ... A specialist told me that I badly needed cochlear implant surgery, but I hesitated because it was very expensive.
They remember the narrative of the order of events but not the subjective experience of normal hearing. Quite common for all kinds of experiences, because stories are culturally held.
He explained that he doesn't read/write English. I do find some of the wording strange. However, the paragraphs and overall structure doesn't feel at all like AI slop. YMMV.
Software like Voicemod transforms speaking voice into a bright, robotic, or Miku-inspired digital idol tone in real time. I wonder if this would help in hearing and understanding speech better.
Pretty much all of the difficulty arises from the transliteration of Greek ψ, υ, χ, and φ, and then inconsistent pronunciations of these letters themselves in loanwords (including pronouncing υ as both /aɪ/ and /ɪ/)!
That's not to say that it's not very tricky, just that the difficulty kind of arises from one core reason.
Edit: OK, one s as /s/ after the c and another s as /z/ between vowels is also tricky and doesn't have to do with Greek.
Author here. I'm Korean, and I have cochlear implants in both ears, which I received in a clinical trial in 2025. No one could tell me what I actually hear, so between 11 October and 4 November 2026 I ran seven psychophysical tests on myself (10,992 trials), using browser test apps that Claude built for me. I'm an amateur, so there are surely mistakes, and corrections are very welcome.
Could you try taking a musical track and doing a low-pass filter to remove anything above 100 hz? If it doesn't sound about the same to you, then that is proof that you are hearing and processing some sound above that 70 hz limit. The inability to distinguish speech sounds more like trouble with higher frequencies (which help discriminate between different syllables) than with frequencies in the 100-400 hz range typical of human speaking f0s - because the latter are also vital to what tends to make music sound full and rich.
A sort of anti HN comment to say but very interesting reading, I don’t know if I have answers to any of your questions but thank you for sharing, I will read more and consider it.
I always told myself I would try and do some fun things with my cochlear implant (Med-El Sonnet) but I never did so reading this was like dusting off some old thoughts of mine.
I was the same, I was born relatively hearing, but started to lose it rapidly - due to a mitochondrial disease (mutation A7445G) which is very rare, but is in a few families around the world. I wore hearing aids for most of my childhood and then got the implant when I was mid 20s.
I've heard a lot of your complaints from others. My sister for example, didn't have a great journey, and even today she reckons everything is still robotic sounding. She however went with a Cochlear Nucleus system, and I was the only one in 30+ people in extended family to go with Med-El (because I liked their tech better) and it's always sounded crisp and clear to me.
I'd have liked to have gotten two, but I was only funded for one - plays havoc with directional hearing. You could have 50 people turn towards a sound, and then there's me turning the opposite direction! :)
I'd be really keen to know if you have any other experiments planned.
I'm glad to hear you discuss listening to music. There's no doubt it will sound different to you, but still well worth enjoying. My best wishes to you for an interesting, and I hope exciting time in your life.
This was beautiful to read. Thank you for writing it! Don’t worry about it reading like slop - your voice comes through very distinctly to me.
You mention a lot of ethics concerns; I am totally uneducated on medical ethics but I think those are pretty important questions. It doesn’t sound like you’ve had a lot of support from this startup.
I might suggest to you that you publish this on a website - GitHub pages comes to mind as something Claude or codex could do for you easily - it would let you segment this information in a way that someone who wanted to help with the medical questions could get right to that stuff, and someone who wanted to help with ethics could also jump to what they were interested in.
Either way, thank you for the write up! Your curious and open attitude is lovely.
You clearly have the hacker mindset (compliment). I hope your investigations are fruitful, for yourself and others who may learn from your experiences!
A looping 10 to 70 Hz sweep got the best result with my 20+ year old Apple sound sticks because they have a subwoofer.
With typical hearing, it sounds like almost a dozen distinct frequencies to me. Higher frequencies are just a matter of degree, they aren't qualitatively different IMHO. But I'm not musically inclined, and only have synesthesia when I sort of see color in various gray patterns on the computer screen, which look more blue or whatever sometimes, so I'm sure someone will disagree with me because they sense feelings in audio that I don't.
I'd bet that improvements in technology over the next few years (especially with the help of AI) might get the upper end to perhaps 100 Hz or more, where it begins to sound more like a tone than a hum. Loosely, a beat (like a drum) sounds like perhaps 10 to 20 Hz. A hum sounds like 60 Hz (like electricity). Also I wonder if a cochlear implant can hear below 10 Hz because it's electrical stimulation instead of physical, to maybe hear frequencies that typical hearing can't? But I don't know.
I'm fascinated by this stuff, because sometime in the next 5-10 years we'll get direct digital signal to nerve implants. That could allow people to hear above 20 kHz (like a dog) or even restore smell in people who have had it diminished due to illness or injury.
Many people can see ultraviolet light after getting cataract surgery, which supposedly looks like a blacklight but more blue because there is a little rise in the red visual receptor the overlaps blue to make violet. So technically the blue receptor ends up being a violet receptor because red isn't removed normally. Which means that violet and purple are different colors, because the visual cortex makes sense of them differently at opposite ends of the spectrum based on how much green is present. Of course all of those distinctions may go away when someday the visual nerves can be stimulated directly with an implant and make color more of a continuous spectrum like sound, rather than having distinct color bands like in a rainbow.
Subjectively, I've noticed when I wake up in the morning that the ceiling has grey and yellow splotches, because we have fewer blue receptors in the fovea at the center of the eye, and they haven't adjusted yet. Also at dusk, the rods begin to sense more, so the world fades from color to cyan and then gray. I feel like similar things might happen with audio, because I feel like I can hear better when I'm camping, especially in the morning, but I don't know why.
There are interesting experiments where they put goggles on chickens to flip the world upside down. After 2 weeks, the chickens saw normally again due to neuroplasticity. Then when they took the goggles off, the chickens walked goofy until their brains readjusted.
Also I've read that lion's mane mushrooms regrow neural connections and may even increase neuron synthesis. I've had neurological injuries due living a rough and tumble life that seemed to have healed somewhat after drinking mushroom coffee for a few weeks. Also magic mushrooms scramble nerve connections and let them reestablish themselves, sort of like starting over with a blank slate in neural networks. Mushroom medicine research has been blocked by a century of ignorant legislation, so people have missed out on spiritual healing that strays outside of what science can explain. I think of a brain or neural net as an antenna that resonates with the consciousness field, which is some sort of 5D-like field that transcends our normal 4D spacetime (otherwise it would be a frozen crystal with no observer or passage of time). When our brains get rewired after learning/trauma/injury/illness/healing, our attention shifts to different things, which alters our subjective experience. Meaning that in a very real sense we perceive the world differently and/or feel like we've shifted to a different (often better) timeline. Plant medicines and spiritual practices may allow changes to subjective experience that science can't yet talk about.
Anyway, not sure what point I'm trying to make here with these breadcrumbs, other than that the future isn't written yet, and in fact there are infinite futures, which I believe free will allows us to choose. So there is always hope and a reason to keep going.
This is interesting and I'm going to write out my thoughts for you here. Just some impressions.
Right off the bat after skimming this I'm caught up with a detail that you confirm multiple times - that you can tell literally nothing apart given any input over 70 hz. You have had this measured a few times and you definitely say that nothing is coming across above 70 hz.
Yet you are trying to hear all sorts of things that have most all of their information content above 70hz.
The Hatsune Miku music? You're hearing the bass and the kick drums and maybe some subharmonics generated in the reverberation of the higher stuff. But that is a tiny fraction of the music, and, I hate to tell you this, but that computer girl singing is all way, waaay up higher than 70hz. The beautiful sounds you are getting across are the cool synth basses of all that music. It's very modern, punchy music and the bass of that type of electronic music is very different from other classical music so whatever modulation your implants are doing to it from 70 hz down likely sounds very cool compared to a lot of other music, for sure.
But, stop- you're getting nothing by noise and wind sounds with no information differentiation over 70hz because your brain isn't demodulating that information, maybe due to something about how the implant was... implanted... or just your specific condition, who knows, but what you can do is work in the band you have.
You mention not getting human voices because the fundamentals of human voices are more than 2x where your cutoff is.
Have you tried using a program like Audacity - or - Get claude to write a script for you that takes in MP3's of modern music and slows them down 300-400 %. The music will be very slow, but it will shift instruments from higher up (pianos, horns, people's signing) down into the 20-70 hz range, and you will maybe hear patterns that are new. Did no one in the study post-op sit with you and go thru this kind of thing? You have all these external trials listed but most all of it is moot if everything above 70hz is missing and you aren't able to modify the modulator hardware.
Note that the type of rhythms in the bass of the bass synthesizers of that Hatsune Miku tracks are different that the more complex rhythms and melodies played by instruments higher up (like pianos and lead synths). (This is true for most all music genres...) Shifting those higher up things down in frequency, even if that means they play back slower, may give you an different musical experience.
Continuously pegging your implant modulation hardware with frequency content above 70hz attempting to discover something about how it interacts with your brain when you continuously get nothing but broadband noise over 70hz seems like a dead end exercise.
I mean hell, have you tried putting a low pass filter to block out on everything in the music/microphone input above 70hz just to make sure that information isn't somehow overloading the way the implant works with your brain, and maybe just causing confusion.
Lastly it sounds like you could benefit from talking with someone with a real audio / digital signals processing / electrical engineering background that can inspect your hardware directly and make suggestions because educating yourself with just GPT runs might be spinning you in circles.
For instance... you mention things like "
The logic of my test apps, which generate the test sounds and move the staircases, was checked with the Lean 4 formal verifier,"
Man... this has nothing to do with needing a 'Lean 4 formal verifier' to check your app or whatever. You need someone to sit with you and your damn hardware and work with some audio input. You need the someone that setup the original implant modular to explain the hardware mapping and filtering options to you and see if you can go back and change how that works, to get more options. You're getting some wildly mixed signals (bad pun) about how all this works, I think.
> Have you tried using a program like Audacity - or - Get claude to write a script for you that takes in MP3's of modern music and slows them down 300-400 %. The music will be very slow, but it will shift instruments from higher up (pianos, horns, people's signing) down into the 20-70 hz range, and you will maybe hear patterns that are new
You don't need to slow them down, you can just pitch shift everything into the 0-70 hz range. If there were a way to figure out how his brain is demodulating the signal, you might even get something pretty reasonable out - the essay describes sounds like cars as hissy rather than heavy.
The real difficulty is keeping genuinely inaudible frequencies (<40 hz? but who knows how his implant works) from swamping the rest, I would think.
I didn't mention just pitch shifting alone without speed change as depending on how that is done it can introduce artifacts. So just slowing things down like an oldschool tape player is the most 'pure'.
Any computer sound card will high-pass anything over about 16-18 hz and thus new lower stuff won't swamp, and it seems like his implant amplifier does indeed deal with low frequencies because he mentions using an 18hz tone to keep the device key'ed on.
Another thing then to mention would be 'binning' audio that has been pitch shifted own using notch filters / comb filters. Because it is possible that however the implant is wired could use some band gaps to help his brain 'decode' things more clearly and less muddy.
Again, all this is simple shit and I find it really surprising that there isn't someone to help run these tests on hardware with this person, and their blog post here has this very strange rabbit hole feel to it and I can't tell if it is because there is a lot lost in translation, or if there is a lot more to this that is coming across in translation... or if this person in being led down some near-AI-psycosis and is struggling because they simply don't have someone to sit with that can help.
That is definitely the weirdest part to me. It is supposed to be a trial for this new implant right? So why isn't the company actually working with them on it? Like how is just telling someone do more therapy acceptable here? Studying their brain's reactions to the stimulus the implant is actually generating seems like something that should have already been done.
I would think you could take the audio processor out of the loop and run diagnostics on the implant itself using an EEG to determine how the brain is responding. They test the hearing of newborns with the tech, you don't need to "trust" a person or even need them to be able to communicate. Its right there in the data.
Based on my read of everything it feels like there is some issue with the implant sending electrical signals, but the nerve not actually picking them up and sending them on. Perhaps related to the original reason for the hearing loss. And the company should want to dig info it more. I know I would if it were my tech.
I understood that they are able to hear pure base tones at higher frequencies. But once they are modulated quicker than 70 Hz (implant electrodes are switched more quickly than that) then it turns into white noise. That would fit with the "all voices are the same" description where everything is reduced to base frequency, without harmonics.
Yeah, ordinary hearing is normally quoted as 20Hz to 20kHz, but most people are hearing mostly between 2000 to 5000Hz. If truly there was no perception above 70Hz that would lead to a very muddy and indistinguishable soundscape.
> most people are hearing mostly between 2000 to 5000Hz
That's pretty misleading, we tend to have excellent hearing anywhere in the 100 hz - 6000 hz range. Much of music and all fundamental frequencies produced by the human voice (except people with very rare whistle register abilities) is below 2000 hz. We're most sensitive to the range you're talking about because it's the most useful for discriminating between different sounds, but still only slightly more sensitive to that range than to lower frequencies.
The culture here is pretty split. Honestly, there's a sizeable contingent that will likely flame/flag you for mere use of AI. Try not to take it too hard; they don't represent everyone and I at least thought your post was a valuable addition here.
Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents [1] and especially not snarky ones. This isn't a response to the article - it's simply repeating a pre-existing association to a recognized name.
We're trying for more interesting conversation here and that requires specifics, not generics.
Another way of putting this is that we want reflective comments rather than reflexive ones [2].
Agreed on all points, and I'd like to point out that most GE appliances aren't actually made by GE. They're essentially selling their name to a manufacturer. Wouldn't be surprised if Samsung is the same.
Frankly a dumb move since it tarnishes their brands, but.. profits?
I wouldn't normally describe hearing a voice as hearing "vibrations". Vibrations are indeed the physical basis of sound, and the auditory system detects changes in air pressure caused by them. But vibrations can also be perceived through touch, and the subjective experience of hearing is quite different from the tactile sensation of feeling something vibrate. When talking about feeling vibrations, I usually think of the touching sensation.
Still, both sensations originate from the same physical phenomenon. You can try to feel your own vocal chords vibrate by placing your fingers on your throat while humming. It's certainly a very different sensation, and touch generally conveys fewer acoustic details than typical hearing, but you're sensing the same underlying physical event.
One interesting example is Dani Valeska (Instagram: @daniivaleska), a Brazilian Sign Language interpreter whose husband is deaf (I couldn't find his name). She shares content about their experiences, and I remember seeing a video in which her husband used the vibrations of her voice, felt by touching her throat, to reproduce what she was saying. This resembles a technique called "tactiling", which has been studied as a tactile aid to speechreading (https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/tactiling-a-us...).
and
> I was born with normal hearing. I began losing my hearing in childhood ... After I was registered, I started wearing hearing aids. People's voices became clear, and for a few months things were good. ... A specialist told me that I badly needed cochlear implant surgery, but I hesitated because it was very expensive.
I'm confused what's going on here.
That's not to say that it's not very tricky, just that the difficulty kind of arises from one core reason.
Edit: OK, one s as /s/ after the c and another s as /z/ between vowels is also tricky and doesn't have to do with Greek.
All trial-level data, the analysis code and Lean 4 checks of the apps' logic are on GitHub (non-commercial licenses): https://github.com/mi-rae-lab/ci-psychophysics-data
I do not speak English. The page was translated with Claude, and I will use AI to read and answer replies, so my answers may be slow.
This is my first time visiting Hacker News, and my first post here. I don't know the culture here well yet, but I deeply respect it and support it.
It is past 1 a.m. here in Korea and I am very tired, so I need to get some sleep. I will check back around 9:30 a.m. Korean time (00:30 UTC).
I always told myself I would try and do some fun things with my cochlear implant (Med-El Sonnet) but I never did so reading this was like dusting off some old thoughts of mine.
I was the same, I was born relatively hearing, but started to lose it rapidly - due to a mitochondrial disease (mutation A7445G) which is very rare, but is in a few families around the world. I wore hearing aids for most of my childhood and then got the implant when I was mid 20s.
I've heard a lot of your complaints from others. My sister for example, didn't have a great journey, and even today she reckons everything is still robotic sounding. She however went with a Cochlear Nucleus system, and I was the only one in 30+ people in extended family to go with Med-El (because I liked their tech better) and it's always sounded crisp and clear to me.
I'd have liked to have gotten two, but I was only funded for one - plays havoc with directional hearing. You could have 50 people turn towards a sound, and then there's me turning the opposite direction! :)
I'd be really keen to know if you have any other experiments planned.
You mention a lot of ethics concerns; I am totally uneducated on medical ethics but I think those are pretty important questions. It doesn’t sound like you’ve had a lot of support from this startup.
I might suggest to you that you publish this on a website - GitHub pages comes to mind as something Claude or codex could do for you easily - it would let you segment this information in a way that someone who wanted to help with the medical questions could get right to that stuff, and someone who wanted to help with ethics could also jump to what they were interested in.
Either way, thank you for the write up! Your curious and open attitude is lovely.
https://hzgenerator.com/sweep-generator
https://onlinetonegenerator.com/frequency-sweep-generator.ht...
A looping 10 to 70 Hz sweep got the best result with my 20+ year old Apple sound sticks because they have a subwoofer.
With typical hearing, it sounds like almost a dozen distinct frequencies to me. Higher frequencies are just a matter of degree, they aren't qualitatively different IMHO. But I'm not musically inclined, and only have synesthesia when I sort of see color in various gray patterns on the computer screen, which look more blue or whatever sometimes, so I'm sure someone will disagree with me because they sense feelings in audio that I don't.
I'd bet that improvements in technology over the next few years (especially with the help of AI) might get the upper end to perhaps 100 Hz or more, where it begins to sound more like a tone than a hum. Loosely, a beat (like a drum) sounds like perhaps 10 to 20 Hz. A hum sounds like 60 Hz (like electricity). Also I wonder if a cochlear implant can hear below 10 Hz because it's electrical stimulation instead of physical, to maybe hear frequencies that typical hearing can't? But I don't know.
I'm fascinated by this stuff, because sometime in the next 5-10 years we'll get direct digital signal to nerve implants. That could allow people to hear above 20 kHz (like a dog) or even restore smell in people who have had it diminished due to illness or injury.
Many people can see ultraviolet light after getting cataract surgery, which supposedly looks like a blacklight but more blue because there is a little rise in the red visual receptor the overlaps blue to make violet. So technically the blue receptor ends up being a violet receptor because red isn't removed normally. Which means that violet and purple are different colors, because the visual cortex makes sense of them differently at opposite ends of the spectrum based on how much green is present. Of course all of those distinctions may go away when someday the visual nerves can be stimulated directly with an implant and make color more of a continuous spectrum like sound, rather than having distinct color bands like in a rainbow.
Subjectively, I've noticed when I wake up in the morning that the ceiling has grey and yellow splotches, because we have fewer blue receptors in the fovea at the center of the eye, and they haven't adjusted yet. Also at dusk, the rods begin to sense more, so the world fades from color to cyan and then gray. I feel like similar things might happen with audio, because I feel like I can hear better when I'm camping, especially in the morning, but I don't know why.
There are interesting experiments where they put goggles on chickens to flip the world upside down. After 2 weeks, the chickens saw normally again due to neuroplasticity. Then when they took the goggles off, the chickens walked goofy until their brains readjusted.
Also I've read that lion's mane mushrooms regrow neural connections and may even increase neuron synthesis. I've had neurological injuries due living a rough and tumble life that seemed to have healed somewhat after drinking mushroom coffee for a few weeks. Also magic mushrooms scramble nerve connections and let them reestablish themselves, sort of like starting over with a blank slate in neural networks. Mushroom medicine research has been blocked by a century of ignorant legislation, so people have missed out on spiritual healing that strays outside of what science can explain. I think of a brain or neural net as an antenna that resonates with the consciousness field, which is some sort of 5D-like field that transcends our normal 4D spacetime (otherwise it would be a frozen crystal with no observer or passage of time). When our brains get rewired after learning/trauma/injury/illness/healing, our attention shifts to different things, which alters our subjective experience. Meaning that in a very real sense we perceive the world differently and/or feel like we've shifted to a different (often better) timeline. Plant medicines and spiritual practices may allow changes to subjective experience that science can't yet talk about.
Anyway, not sure what point I'm trying to make here with these breadcrumbs, other than that the future isn't written yet, and in fact there are infinite futures, which I believe free will allows us to choose. So there is always hope and a reason to keep going.
Right off the bat after skimming this I'm caught up with a detail that you confirm multiple times - that you can tell literally nothing apart given any input over 70 hz. You have had this measured a few times and you definitely say that nothing is coming across above 70 hz.
Yet you are trying to hear all sorts of things that have most all of their information content above 70hz.
The Hatsune Miku music? You're hearing the bass and the kick drums and maybe some subharmonics generated in the reverberation of the higher stuff. But that is a tiny fraction of the music, and, I hate to tell you this, but that computer girl singing is all way, waaay up higher than 70hz. The beautiful sounds you are getting across are the cool synth basses of all that music. It's very modern, punchy music and the bass of that type of electronic music is very different from other classical music so whatever modulation your implants are doing to it from 70 hz down likely sounds very cool compared to a lot of other music, for sure.
But, stop- you're getting nothing by noise and wind sounds with no information differentiation over 70hz because your brain isn't demodulating that information, maybe due to something about how the implant was... implanted... or just your specific condition, who knows, but what you can do is work in the band you have.
You mention not getting human voices because the fundamentals of human voices are more than 2x where your cutoff is.
Have you tried using a program like Audacity - or - Get claude to write a script for you that takes in MP3's of modern music and slows them down 300-400 %. The music will be very slow, but it will shift instruments from higher up (pianos, horns, people's signing) down into the 20-70 hz range, and you will maybe hear patterns that are new. Did no one in the study post-op sit with you and go thru this kind of thing? You have all these external trials listed but most all of it is moot if everything above 70hz is missing and you aren't able to modify the modulator hardware.
Note that the type of rhythms in the bass of the bass synthesizers of that Hatsune Miku tracks are different that the more complex rhythms and melodies played by instruments higher up (like pianos and lead synths). (This is true for most all music genres...) Shifting those higher up things down in frequency, even if that means they play back slower, may give you an different musical experience.
Continuously pegging your implant modulation hardware with frequency content above 70hz attempting to discover something about how it interacts with your brain when you continuously get nothing but broadband noise over 70hz seems like a dead end exercise.
I mean hell, have you tried putting a low pass filter to block out on everything in the music/microphone input above 70hz just to make sure that information isn't somehow overloading the way the implant works with your brain, and maybe just causing confusion.
Lastly it sounds like you could benefit from talking with someone with a real audio / digital signals processing / electrical engineering background that can inspect your hardware directly and make suggestions because educating yourself with just GPT runs might be spinning you in circles.
For instance... you mention things like " The logic of my test apps, which generate the test sounds and move the staircases, was checked with the Lean 4 formal verifier,"
Man... this has nothing to do with needing a 'Lean 4 formal verifier' to check your app or whatever. You need someone to sit with you and your damn hardware and work with some audio input. You need the someone that setup the original implant modular to explain the hardware mapping and filtering options to you and see if you can go back and change how that works, to get more options. You're getting some wildly mixed signals (bad pun) about how all this works, I think.
You don't need to slow them down, you can just pitch shift everything into the 0-70 hz range. If there were a way to figure out how his brain is demodulating the signal, you might even get something pretty reasonable out - the essay describes sounds like cars as hissy rather than heavy.
The real difficulty is keeping genuinely inaudible frequencies (<40 hz? but who knows how his implant works) from swamping the rest, I would think.
Any computer sound card will high-pass anything over about 16-18 hz and thus new lower stuff won't swamp, and it seems like his implant amplifier does indeed deal with low frequencies because he mentions using an 18hz tone to keep the device key'ed on.
Another thing then to mention would be 'binning' audio that has been pitch shifted own using notch filters / comb filters. Because it is possible that however the implant is wired could use some band gaps to help his brain 'decode' things more clearly and less muddy.
Again, all this is simple shit and I find it really surprising that there isn't someone to help run these tests on hardware with this person, and their blog post here has this very strange rabbit hole feel to it and I can't tell if it is because there is a lot lost in translation, or if there is a lot more to this that is coming across in translation... or if this person in being led down some near-AI-psycosis and is struggling because they simply don't have someone to sit with that can help.
It all comes off to me as very, very strange.
I would think you could take the audio processor out of the loop and run diagnostics on the implant itself using an EEG to determine how the brain is responding. They test the hearing of newborns with the tech, you don't need to "trust" a person or even need them to be able to communicate. Its right there in the data.
Based on my read of everything it feels like there is some issue with the implant sending electrical signals, but the nerve not actually picking them up and sending them on. Perhaps related to the original reason for the hearing loss. And the company should want to dig info it more. I know I would if it were my tech.
Wikipedia is not bad on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range
That's pretty misleading, we tend to have excellent hearing anywhere in the 100 hz - 6000 hz range. Much of music and all fundamental frequencies produced by the human voice (except people with very rare whistle register abilities) is below 2000 hz. We're most sensitive to the range you're talking about because it's the most useful for discriminating between different sounds, but still only slightly more sensitive to that range than to lower frequencies.
We're trying for more interesting conversation here and that requires specifics, not generics.
Another way of putting this is that we want reflective comments rather than reflexive ones [2].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
I also can't imagine what you thought this comment was contributing to the conversation but that's not my problem I guess.
Frankly a dumb move since it tarnishes their brands, but.. profits?