Hope you find this interesting, apologies if it's posted in the wrong place.

WiredNews

Wow!

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Google less; read more!

Cool read - makes me realize how much I take my normal hearing for granted...

Never heard the Bolero myself - got to find it now!

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Overview Productions

That's great, really like the last sentence "While my friends' ears will inevitably decline with age, mine will only get better." its amazing what we can achieve with technology these days and its great to see the speed at which everything is improving,
thanks for that
Doug

Great article! Maybe we should ask our friendly mods to set up a separate forum for interesting news/advances in the musical world that we come across in our daily surfing?

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Music is the only noise for which one is obliged to pay.
(Attrib. to Alexandre Dumas)

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Helen Keller famously said that if she had to choose between being deaf and being blind, she'd be blind, because while blindness cut her off from things, deafness cut her off from people.

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I often think what I would do if I was ever to make such a decission...I'd choose to keep my ears, too, I guess...

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When I finally discovered the meaning of life, they changed it...

My missus is a carer for the deaf blind
Sometimes I take phone calls from the people she cares for...
A BT operator acts as an interpreter for braille entered text messages and reads them aloud to me.
Without sounding condescending this never ceases to amaze me.
Here we are complaining and arguing about whether Mackie gear is sh*t or Microphone Z with a capsule out of the same factory as Microphone Y sounds better ...

And these guys and gals cannot not only not see - they can't bloody hear as well..
(saying that - one of the people she cares for has a jetski and is apparantly the deaf/blind quad bike speed record holder at 86 mph...)

As a highly educated group of the greatest philosophers of our time once said at a meeting in Gracelands..

"Too much f***ing perspective..."

Edited by Simon (aka UK03878) (26/10/05 03:03 PM)

What an inspiring chap, and the researchers too. The inner ear is one of the most (sometimes frustratingly) complex organs in the body, and often one of the hardest to treat. Would be truly awesome if ever sometime in the future they could hopefully offer those disadvantaged the luxury of being able to hear well.
Was born totally deaf in my left ear too, so fully appreciate the sheer dynamicism of senses captured in t'other. I can honestly say I've never taken this ability for granted.

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http://Infekted.org ~ Access Virus news & community

absolutely fascinating!

im so glad that some people out there are seriously and successfully researching sound-related electronics for reasons like this as opposed to making it easier and cheaper for the rest of us to make music with loads of sassy and often silly effects and whatnot.

really uplifting in fact.

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"a paradigm of restraint and good taste at a time of frequent excess"

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A year later, I met Rubinstein at another conference, and he mentioned that there might be ways to bring music back to me. He told me about something called stochastic resonance; studies suggested that my music perception might be aided by deliberately adding noise to what I hear. He took a moment to give me a lesson in neural physiology. After a neuron fires, it goes dormant for a fraction of a second while it resets. During that phase, it misses any information that comes along. When an electrode zaps thousands of neurons at once, it forces them all to go dormant, making it impossible for them to receive pulses until they reset. That synchrony means I miss bits and pieces of information.

Desynchronizing the neurons, Rubinstein explained, would guarantee that they're never all dormant simultaneously. And the best way to get them out of sync is to beam random electrical noise at them. A few months later, Rubinstein arranged a demonstration.

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Sound like dither, anyone?!

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www.ehsound.co.uk - Live Sound Hire & Services

Quote Michael Harrison:

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Sound like dither, anyone?!

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Indeed so. It is exactly that, and it does for the neurons exactly the same job as it does for digital quantisers.

hugh

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Technical Editor, Sound On Sound