What a Cochlear Implant sounds like 

Yeah, I always find "laymen" descriptions of audio effects very interesting because they immediately say things like "it sounds like it's playing through a wall" when all I hear immediately is "low pass filter." Laymen also confuse reverb and delay a lot. They're both just "echo" to them.

@@urphakeandgey6308 I agree with you 100%

I feel like she's trying to describe phase effects.

I was thinking they really need a Audi engineer who could ask the right questions. Do you think you could have understood what she was trying to say. Talking through a brick wall turns out to be muffled in my opinion.

Yeah I am pretty certain she is asking for a bit crusher to drop it down to 6bits with dither. At least that is what I assume she is looking for.

I was about to say the opposite. I bet she has no experience in audio editing or music playing. She has no lexicon...

It was just muffled, that’s all she needed to say.

that didn't look hard, look like the test eye doctor do to you to give you glass prescription

@@omgtkseth No, she has innate ability. That's to me a lot more impressive as she doesn't have the exact words but is still able to describe it

Plus she mentions white noise and the final effect has no white noise on it. This is probably a mistake on the person showing the sounds as apparently cochlear implants consist of 12 “channels” (0 or 1 per channel essentially) that allow you to “read” sounds like a computer ( very broad analogy). White noise on the background might sound a lot like the quantization on the auditory frequencies your perceive with an implant (think of a broken radio changing pitch all of a sudden for example, or the “broken toy” analogy many people talk about). IMO she definitely explained herself well. So well in fact, that it was the person playing the audio and playing with the equalizer which did not manage to introduce that “white noise” feel she was talking about. In the end however, she probably got the band pass right and that’s probably why the girl was like “that’s it!”, but it makes no sense that the effect she says is “right” has a flanger on it. This makes no sense as flangers are very slight pitch shifting Audio effects, however when taken to the extreme (not the case here) they might sound a bit robotic (probably why the demonstrator decided to use it as an effect). If she had lowered the bits on the last demo to 12 bits, as in as many channels as the cochlear implant has, she probably would have said it was an even more accurate depiction of it (slightly more robotic, like the feel of a a “lofi” melody).

Dion7 first one scared the shit out of me.

Papyrus Senpai Same!😂😂😂

I got so scared

its the borg, of course its scary

If you've ever listened to the narration for The Silence Experiment, it sounded exactly like the mutant voices out of that.

This made me LOL

@BEANSSSSSS ikr i would be terrified if i would have to hear that

lmaaoooooo yes it's terrifying

Borg

Yeah, if everyone sounded like that to me, I'd live by myself

*speech

Lou Ferrigno said it sounded like beeps from a Star Wars movie (I'm assuming he was referring to R2-D2 or BB-8).

From my own experience it's entirely within the scope of a CI to provide hearing which sounds completely normal.

@@WorthlessDeadEnd during the activation...

why are they fascinating? it's all existing technology that you are already familiar with in other electronic devices.

Nice day for fishing, ain't it?

@@Xevailo Didn't expect a random vldl reference here

Omg same

Damn i forgot this comment existed

SAME!

Same here!

Same!

Dave Mitchell probably is and if there isn't, someone could purposely damage their hearing and do that

Nah, you don't NEED dammaged hearing to install the implant.

im sure theres many people who had natural hearing then lost it and now have a CI

MattGaming+ I really doubt that there’s an audio engineer who’s willing to damage their ears just to find out what it sound like. Audio engineers love sound. To have their hearing degraded would be a nightmare.

The biggest struggle is processing the sound in the environment and converting that into signals for the brain to interpret. This needs to exist on your head running off of battery power. Hopefully technology keeps scaling to the point where that isn't an issue anymore.

Me too

this sounds sooo much better then they made it seem like in the film

@@TheValCapGroup From what I understand, it's different for everyone. I believe many people have to train their brain when they first receive the cochlear implant and it can take quite some time, around a year for some people. So it's very possible someone would experience it how Ruben did. I don't have an implant myself, so this is only what I know from what I've read.

Lol me too

Yup, definitely me.

I want to hear how it sounds with music. I've been told by a user that it sucks for music, that it sounds like electronic noise.

it depends for every deaf person with cochlear implant for me it sounds like the cosest at 3:09 ...

@@SarafinaSummers Doesn't sound that way at all for me.

​@@SarafinaSummersI think the implants have improved significantly over the last handful of years. Last time I saw one of these videos, the sound was extremely robotic. Closer to dialup noise than the original sound. But that video was several years ago

Well, we're hearing the processed audio before it gets to the implant, so we can't know how it's actually sounding in the patient's ear.

Control over the processor would be a must have for me if I ever end up deaf and getting one.

at what age you got the implant?

That's really all I want. To hear my mom's voice again.

I know this reply is from 4 years ago, but has the technology improved for you? Can you hear words distinctly? I have progressive hearing loss, and everything sounds muffled to me. With hearing aids, things just sound muffled, but louder. I still can't make out a lot of what people are saying and it's very frustrating. I'm trying to decide what to do next. I'm 56 now. Do you think I'm too old?

@@LuckyBadger You're definitely not too old. Your hearing loss will progress and (IMO) having it done when you can still hear a little more than a bit will aid in returning to your "normal" hearing more quickly. And you likely should do only one ear and "match" it up with your other as best as you can. Then get the second implant for the other ear and match that to the new implant in opposite ear. Seems a great time to get it done. BUT>>> be sure you want to live with no hearing at all (if you do both ears) when your implants are not turned on and it's at night in your home or apartment. Might be a good idea to have a dog. Anyway, consult a couple good doctors and stay safe.

I freaked out the first time I heard...there were so many times I was terrified. I still get scared of lots of sounds even now.😊

Nice analogy :)

read the description guys

Tesser 4D Read it. Most implants, according to every other example I've heard, sound nowhere near as good as that.

Newer implants are apparently a lot better than the 10+ year old simulations you can find online, and the final audio quality depends on the individual.

My neice watched this and she was confused. She said the last two clips sound identical. She has a modern cochlear implant, installed last year.

@@rich1051414 hi! May I ask if can your niece still hear music naturally? Because with hearing aids, pianos, flutes, organs or giitar dont sound natural to me.

My thought too! So much high frequency missing. If only one could get it up to 4kHz or so...

​@@katho8472From what i've read about cochlear implants, it IS possible to add more frequencies but due to technology limitations (and the way cochlear implants work) it isnt beneficial for the patient. The implants produce a crude interpretation of human hearing within a very limited range, so adding more frequencies tends to flood the patient with too much noise making it impossible for the implants/brain to interpret sounds as anything coherent.

Because each section of the cochlea responds to a specific frequency and the cochlear implant electrodes cannot be fully inserted into the cochlea. Up to 1½ turn instead of 2½.

warmcozy thank you!

Thank you

This takes all the fun off it...

The 's' sounds were totally obliterated. Couldn't make out the phrase until I went back and heard the original.

+warmcozy I am SO glad I do NOT read comments first. You take all of the excitement and suspense out of the experience.

So are the people’s voices still the same like before you did the implant ? I’m very nervous and feel really depressed

@@ciaociaobb They sound completely normal.

I'd say a complete neural reoganization of the brain takes about 18 months. I got roaring tinnitus about 5 years ago. It was very depressing at first and it absolutely rivited my attention, I could think of nothing else but the constant screech. But I decided to completely ignore it -- no hoping it would get better, no wishing it wasn't there, just complete acceptance/ignoring it. After about 18 months I realized that I mostly wasn't hearing it at all. Sometimes because it wasn't there, but often because I just couldn't pay attention to it -- like the traffic outside or your refrigerator fan. Sure, you could force yourself to hear the traffic outside, but in half a minute, you'll forget and it's gone. I'm guessing that's about the time scale of full auditory cortex reorganization.

@@grbradsk That's so interesting. Thanks for sharing

It also depends a lot from person to person, from what Ive been told Some get to the level where it feels almost normal, others can never get to the level where they can understand speech

it will eventually die like your expectations.

lolololol thats sad tho

Thats the comment I was looking for

Literally the borg from Star Trek sound 😂

@@ReubachiResistance is futile.

That's honestly so cool.

Some kind of modulation, maybe by noise?

I'm fascinated by this. Had you been able to hear previously? If not, how did you have any reference point to compare what you were hearing to? e.g. broken glass, etc.

awh!!

i believe you misunderstood what they were doing here. the edited sounds do not sound normal to her. they are playing the different edited sounds so she can compare the sound coming from her implant to something. whenever we hear the original sound, it is played through her implant and she hears it the way we hear the last edited version hear. this is due to the limitations of the implant and has nothing to do with the brain adjusting to anything.

@@NiliMotoyeah. it’s an interesting theory but i would not expect her brian processing to have changed much since she can still hear in one ear.

@@NiliMotoso the last edited sound we hear is what she hears through her implant?

@@olivier0092 Yep, it’s audible but very low quality, and without the implant she wouldn’t hear anything. the fact that such technology exists at all is a miracle though. with the advent of better technology over the next century such implants will improve to the point that they match or even exceed the natural human counterparts. truly exciting times we live in!

She described one time as like a robot. Ummm how does she...

It's not just parametric EQ, it should also have something to displace/stretch frequencies up and down. I guess they already do something like that in the set up stage. Also the limitation may also be caused by the hardware which may be removing those frequencies on purpose because they're just noise when misinterpreted as other frequencies.

What about music??

How is it for listening to music? Thanks

How long did it take you to adjust?

@@leifwallin6024 I've got 2 MED-EL Synchrony 2 implants and I *love* listening music, it's amazing!

@@Aaron-xs5bv maybe 1...24 months, the longer you practice, the better the result.

I bet the adjustment period is different for different people. My uneducated guess would be that those who were hearing and/or recently had hearing loss adjust quicker than those who have never been hearing or who lost their hearing many years ago.

I'm sure there are always people working on it.

Maybe some day

They did I got mine if sounds just like normal

google "optogenetic cochlear implant" or "hearing with light cochlear" With that methode they can use 100 channels instead of just 12. But sadly we have to wait around 10 years. www.auditory-neuroscience.uni-goettingen.de/hearing_the_light_EN.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-H81pFgTh9y0.html

Yes, current implants only use about 12 channels. It seems each channel is able to reproduce about 66Hz~ of sound range. Where normal human hearing is about 20-20,000 Hz, this implant is only able to cover 800Hz of range. We would need about 303 channels to properly emulate "normal" hearing.

Thats how it was done

Why wouldnt you believe her?

@@beepbopboop7727 I’m sorry I’m not sure what you mean?

I assume her hearing with the N7 has improved by now, yes?

@@beepbopboop7727 what do you mean? Her daughter is deaf, so she wouldn’t really know the difference between how her parents voice and Donald Duck.

@@beepbopboop7727 It’s not about not believing her. She’s hoping that she’s not making the correct comparison, or that it means something different, because Donald Duck to a hearing person is quite a grating sound. The character is meant to be a little ridiculous and annoying. Most parents wouldn’t want that to be the voice their child hears every time they communicate with them.

To me too the one before the last and the one at 1:10 sounded exactly right the original, and she said that the previous one at 0:52 sounded closer while it was way off low and muffled

I had the same thought, the one that was second-to-last sounded closest to "correct" to my ears, apart from some phasing. By correct, I mean closest to the original. Which is not necessarily the goal here; if her hearing is calibrated toward the lower end of the spectrum it makes sense to roll off higher frequencies to increase intelligibility for her. But from the perspective of the potential of the technology to accurately reproduce sound, this video fascinates me. I always thought CIs did not offer a full range of hearing and had aliasing and other weird artifacts. If the sound in this video is what someone hears through one, then the others I've heard in the past must have been calibrated way wrong. Which is actually not that surprising if the person has no frame of reference for what sound should sound like! Now I wonder how well it does with music or ambient noise.

I’m not at all deaf but currently have horrible squealing and bells in my ears. Ears are just not made right. I need to have a chat with the guy who came up with ears.

So 200 3000 with the crazy flanger is the best one for you? Odd that they use flanger for this stuff. I thought it was just for guitar.

I don't even have a hearing aid because I can't afford them, and I'm at least currently not officially deaf, just hard of hearing. I also thought the second to last was best, except yeah, I can also hear the lo-pass FX, only in extra sybillance. (The "s" sounds--and they have a dance music sound because yeah, lo-pass filter, but other than that, it sounds like a perfect match to me, too!

Same amazing film

I hope for your sake that you just put that through google translate.

I was born i am daef

I am not sure if I understand, but you shouldn't be sad. Even if it sounds like you are hearing underwater, that is much better than not hearing at all. You should be happy.

@@TheAkashicTraveller ASL is a different language from english. It has different grammar and sentance structure, so if OP is deaf, then that's probably why the grammer and wording seems wrong to you

@@rich1051414 also that's an incredibly ignorant thing to say. Many deaf and HOH people are perfectly happy not hearing, and dont want to hear. The deaf community is an actual community with it's own culture, and many deaf people dont consider themselves to be disabled. Also, the sound from CI's can be painful to some people, and often hearing something unpleasant, painful, or robotic can be worse than not hearing.

I can answer the last one (because I googled it, but also I know which terms to look up and not everyone does) The vestibular system (which provides balance) uses the same type of sensor cells that the auditory system does, so it's pretty common for people who are deaf from birth to also have balance problems. However, those sensors are physically located in a different place from where the hearing happens, so a cochlear implant generally won't affect them.

God had nothing to do with it. Nothing can NOT educate.

@@FirstLastOneCringe materialist🤣

Thank God for Jesus.

god made her deaf

​@@DonnaChambersonAmen. I don't understand the hate.

Did you ever get it?

If God only stuffed up one of your ears, does he really deserve thanks?

Did you get an implant?

Normally they would implant the bad ear first.

i think it's the other way round. The high frequency roll off to match the other means she's hearing the muffled form, and the reason the original sounds the same is that the originals highs aren't being picked up. She's not hearing the original, she's hearing the muffled sound, which means the cochlear implant would need to boost a lot of highs to get it closet, but then if it were doing that, we would hear that in the muffled version, it would be less muffled as she would detect the higher frequencies

@@SimonsBand1 OK..... That would make sense , because she hears it in reverse of what we do .... ! Interesting as all hell ..... Amazing how the tech in this field is moving steadily forward ....

​@@joeserrenti9857I think you misunderstood what's happening. She's listening to the original sound through the implant, and then she's hearing the modified sound through her good ear. She's then telling us whether the modified sound matches what she's hearing through the implant. Thus, the modified sound at the end is actually pretty close to what she experiences with the implant.

Emitting about 3.86 x 10^26 Watts of energy.

Finally shining

A lot of the challenge comes with the size of the electrodes, limiting how many frequencies can be transmitted (like two dozens, compared to about a thousand for non-hearing-impaired people) The percieved frequencies are set once the implant is in the ear, and there is only so much the processing can do

+Casey P What you are seeing and hearing in this video is not fine tuning of a cochlear implant. The lady on the CPU is just tweaking the sound file so she can hear what the girl is hearing.

+cinemar oh... Bummer.. That makes me feel even worse for people with hearing loss/deafness. I guess robot voice is better than no voice at all. :/

theres more cons to it than just a robot voice

+Casey P I have 2 cochlear implants. When I hear sounds It sounds normal as if I was not deaf. I talk normal as if any other human. Most deaf people do not though. A lot of that has to do with what age you are when implanted and taking speech classes. I currently do not take any speech classes. Havent taken any in 9-12 years

they don't sound like robots btw i have one.

Well, we're pretty on-track for being able to grow entire new body parts. De/Recellularizing scaffolds is the main part, we just need to get better at it. We might live to see rejected organ transplants become a thing of the past if all goes well.

I found that movie VERY INFURIATING. There is a large internal debate among the deaf community, with a large portion being VERY anti CI. These people dont even see being deaf as a disability. That movie honestly just came off like a religious propaganda movie.

Depends on your age and when/if you lost your hearing and if you like mayo or mustard...

Werczita which device did you go with?

what's cool about it is you can have absolutely silent earphones which make you deaf while used. That's a practical application I can get down wiht

@Andrew Ongais Do you have problem with identifying the direction of sound with one ear?

With one ear direction and clarity are quite difficult. Plug up one ear and try it for a day.

From my understanding of this, after watching a SciShow video: It's like a low resolution digital photo with only a small number of pixels; you can not improve it just because you know how it compares to a high resolution photo. It time the technology will improve with more distinct signals being sent. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-lzgQrHFDNLE.html

Generally speaking, we never stop attempts to refine augmentative technology. I have no doubt each iteration of implant is an improvement over the previous one.

In the human cochlea there are approximately 3500 inner hair cells and 12000 outer hair cells. In order to perfectly replicate human hearing we would have to perfectly simulate the responses of these and somehow transmit that to the nerves from the cochlea. At the moment we do this by implanting an array of electrodes to to stimulate cochlea nerve. Manufacturers use varying numbers of electrodes but the receiver/processors don't transmit 1 channel to one electrode but rather 1 to many there's also the issue that the electrode don't just stimulate the nerve of one hair cell but many around it. Basically there are a whole lot of issues to solve before we can replicate human hearing. Another one, though I'm not sure if this applies to cochlea implants but does for other neural implants, is that the electrodes can damage the nerves so yeah.

+Ken O That isn't completely true. They could apply processing to boost bands of the sound to make the sound more accurate, but it could never be perfect. Think of it like the 'color correcting' glasses you can wear. They could definitely use processing to make the sound sound less muffled, which would probably sound horrific to normal ears, far too sparkly.

She seems really patient and nice person.

Yeah, she's not saying the last clip sounds closest to the "original" clip. She's saying the last clip sounds closest to how her cochlear implant hears/interprets the "original" clip.

+Crystal Macias I am 14 and was implanted in (right ear) at 16 months. (Left ear) at 4 or 5. The earlier the better. I recommend taking speech classes while young. It helped me tremendously. I did not like it but glad my parents made the decision to do speech classes. I hear and talk normal as if I was not deaf. Very incredible what technology can do.

I am happy for you but I feel so sorry for your baby, your baby didnt have a choice. My girlfriend have C.I while she was very young, she is unhappy with it now..... (and angry to her parents)

Murray Twins yes. My son is 2 yrs old. Has had them for 1 yr. speech therapy has a lot to do with it. I'm happy to see my 2 year old babbling lots of words already! Daddy, bye, thank you, ouch, making lots off animal sounds, I say kiss kiss and he turns to give me kisses. Lots more than what I just put at just 1 yr of hearing with his cochlears. I'm happy to see everything he has accomplished and can't wait to see more that I know he will do❤️

The implants are great when considering the alternative is nothing. Something for you to be aware of is that they do cause headaches for lots of people. Your little guy may or may not have this problem but you may want to watch for it. Also music and loud noise like loud automobiles (road noise and such) or loud movies at the theater are sometimes very hard on the ear when the implant is turned on. As for movies, they are hard to understand the speech most of the time. Myself, I generally get about ten percent of the conversation and just get the jest of the rest of the movie. Like watching a movie in a foreign language. Just FYI for when he starts watching movies and television. Radios and television are difficult to understand.

MegaHouseGuy Why can't you hear at the movies?

Its because he doesnt know what his voice sounds like when he haves his implants off.

Maybe you can test it yourself - if you can get a pair of headphones to cancel out sound (maybe also with active noise cancellation) - be careful not to play it too loud for too long! - and then record your voice when you can't hear yourself. see if it sounds normal compared to a regular recording of your voice.

although this sounds super obvious, im going to guess he just doesnt have any auditorial feedback to shift and/or change his pitch and tone when theyre off. when theyre on, he is able to hear himself, reflect on what sounds "natural," and adjust accordingly. without them there is no way to know what his voice is doing, and i doubt there is any way to feel the difference in his throat unless he was trying to yell vs whisper