In recent weeks I have been hearing voices. No, I am not hallucinating or having a mental breakdown, although you might want to check with my family and friends. Rather, the voices I’m hearing belong to some of my family and friends, recorded and then rerejiggered by AI. Rejiggered is likely not the technical term for what has been done to those voices. As you can see, my knowledge of AI is highly limited.
The story is this: In March I had a cochlear implant in my right ear after learning that it was rapidly losing capacity. I had worn hearing aids for over a decade, but it seemed that hearing aids would no longer be able to compensate for the amount of hearing loss in that ear. The surgery was scary to think about — a hole drilled in the skull to insert a wire that would transmit electronic impulses to the cochlea, the business part of the human hearing equipment. Still, except for some dizziness after the surgery, the physical part of the recovery was uncomplicated. The hard part has been learning to hear in a new way. Normal hearing is a response to acoustical sound, vibrations in the air. By contrast, the cochlear implant produces an electronic sound which takes time to get used to, to “normalize.” My initial experience was that it sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks. But the brain, the explanation goes, learns to accommodate to the new experience. In my seventh month after the surgery, my brain and I have clearly adapted to a pretty good extent. Very well, in fact, according to my excellent audiologist. She tells me I am understanding speech much better than before. Evidently I had 8% capacity in that ear before the implant and now have 56%, making 84% with my two ears combined. Good to know, although the experience itself is still less than perfect. Probably will never be. But much better than the alternative.
The implant itself is not pretty. I wear a discreetly small hearing aid in one ear which communicates with the implant, making it possible to use Bluetooth on my cell phone and elsewhere. The implant’s microphone and speech processor sits behind my other ear from which extends a cable holding a quarter-sized disk, the transmitter, which attaches to the magnet surgically placed under my scalp, which holds the receiver, from where the wire with electrodes attaches to the cochlea. The gray of the equipment matches my hair, sort of. I could probably grow my hair longer to cover it up but I like to keep my hair short, so there’s a kind of Frankenstein’s monster look to the whole enterprise. Never mind, it works.
There is, in addition, a lot of equipment. Batteries to recharge each night on both the hearing aid and the implant’s mic. A separate pocket-sized microphone that can be used in noisy situations or with people whose voices are hard to hear. That has to be charged and its tiny buttons mastered. The hearing aid’s infinitesimal wax guard has to be replaced periodically. There is another gadget to help better communicate the TV’s always bad audio. I have to wear a headband when I do anything energetic to keep the processor from flying off my head.
A few weeks after the surgery, I realized that when I remove both pieces of hearing equipment at night, I am almost totally deaf. I could not hear my cell phone’s alarm to wake me in the morning. And more importantly, after my husband asked if I’d heard the smoke alarm making its battery replacement beeps, I realized I would not hear the smoke alarm. A call to the Amherst Fire Department brought some welcome assistance, a vibrating under-the-mattress gadget that wakes me up smartly and which a member of the fire department attached to a second smoke alarm that will do the same.
Meanwhile, those voices. My audiologist has connected me to a website that works to improve hearing using artificial intelligence. I have an avatar, a nice looking woman that/who encourages me (Nice going! Keep it up! She/it says.). But more interestingly I have been able to ask my friends and relations to record their voices so that the ones I hear in the midst of background noise are familiar. Of course they are also artificial. My husband is telling me about the life cycle of snails, a subject he would never approach. My vegetarian grandkid is recommending trying the sausages of various countries. Listening to these voices is supposed to be training my brain to hear better. Let’s hope AI knows what it’s doing.
Marietta Pritchard lives, writes, and tries to hear what you’re saying in Amherst. You can reach her electronically at mppritchard@comcast.net.