Chaos Manor Special Reports Frank Forman, Cochlear Cyborg Monday, July 30, 2007     THIS IS PERIODICALLY UPDATED.   Frank Forman is an old on-line friend who underwent a cochlear implant. This is his story. I make no comments, but I post it so that it will be available for those interested.

Frank Forman, Cochlear Cyborg, through 2007.7.24

This is a running diary of an operation that gave me an artificial ear and of my relearning how to hear. What makes my case different is that I am a keen lover of classical music and am self-experimenting on struggling to relearn how to hear music speech and vice versa. Go down to PART ONE: INTRODUCTION at the end to get an overview. Excuse the typos. I'm writing all this in a file, and the spell checker insists on running through the whole document in a seemingly random fashion, which by now is quite time consuming. When I'm doing an e-mail it goes from top to bottom, which is very fast. "Don't ask me why. Go ask your pop," says Dr. Seuss in one of his books I have heard over and over again.

Sarah is my wife. Andrea Marlowe is my audiologist at Johns Hopkins. Greg Frane is a fellow graduate of the University of Virginia who comes up for ten minutes and helps me go through some exercises every day at work. It was my right ear that was operated on.

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Sunday, 2007 July 24

In general this period, as far as music goes, the good news is that I  was hearing all of Silverman's new recording of the Diabelli  Variations in my meat ear with the notes correctly on the scale when I  was out jogging. Since this stretch rarely happens, I kept listening  and didn't get out a book to read on the subway. I wasn't much in the  mood for late Beethoven, so I didn't get the spiritual absorption that  makes music so important to me. With the last variation, the scale got  distorted. So on the way home, I tried it with both ears. Same problem.  My cassette has on the second side, the last Diabelli variation, the  Liszt sonata (which I never absorbed in to my repetroire (hearing  repetroire, that is: I certainly can't play it. I mean that I need to  get to know a  work familiarly. I'm amazed at those who can just really  hear a work for the first time. But back before recordings, concert  goes must have really given their brains at work out. Today we can just  go home and listen to the work again.) and Beethoven's most important  work he never assigned an opus number to, namely the 32 variations in c  on his own theme. Again, the last variation was all distorted as far as  the scale goes (the notes are clean). I got nothing out of the Liszt,  as my tunes came on. When the 32 variations came on, I was able to  detect that they were there, since they do have a certain recognizable  snap. Walking home with them on that night wasn't much of a success  either.

And so it went. Finishing with Silverman, I put on the Brahms chamber  music but with almost no luck, sometimes not even a clean movement. I  have filled the ends of these tapes with Brahms' short pieces and one  that was mostly in the low notes came on, with the scale correct. Low  notes don't trigger my hallucinating tunes. This time I was more ready  for the message of the music. I was listening to Gould play it this  time. An early recording from 1960, he played it pretty straight, but I  never thought esp. deeply. There are two live performances of the  Brahms first piano concerto. The one with Bernstein was going to be  played so slowly that Bernstein spoke to the audience before hand (and  later *claimed* that it was not a disclaimer). However, the one that  got circulated underground and finally published was not the notorious  one but a second or third performance. It is still quite slow, but  since then other performers have slowed it down, too. Celibidache, the  Romanian conductor, is famous for being slow. While the first hearing  is intriguiging, he turns out to *only* be slow. Although the  instrumental groups play with unusual articularity, there is no musical  depth. Mravinsky's magic was to bring to prominence and then let recede  various instrumental groups, but he did so with the profoundest  understanding of the music. Gould's other performance of the Brahms,  with someone and the Baltimore SO, is not so slow, but is so very  articulate that I hear notes I never heard in this music before.

Walking home, I have been listening to Silverman Diabelli variations, a  few at a time and in just my meat ear. (My cord got frayed and I  couldn't listen in the cyber ear. This is a recurrent problem!) The  scale was off, but these times I was more in the mood for the music.  When I got home on one of these occasions, I continued at home to the  end and now with both ears. My concentration had receded by the end,  though.

So, the next time on my way home, I put in the tape of Backhaus'  Diabellis, which as I have said before have more bass to them. This  time I carried some patch chords so I could listen in both ears.  Terrible. I could detect only one or two variations. The next morning,  as I went to replace the tape with more Brahms, I discovered that I had  been listening to Gould playing Mozart! But somehow my mind expected  some Diabelli variations, and a couple of them I thought I had quite  dimly heard. You see, sometimes everything is horribly dim. You may say  that Frank hears what he wants to hear, a common charge appealing to  general facts about human bias that are not in the least sense  specific.

On Friday, July 27, I listened to Szigeti's great LP of the Brahms  first violin sonata when out jogging (meat ear only, as I usually do  when jogging). The first two movements came out okay. Then the tunes  started up for the last two movements and the first movement of the  third sonata. But, I was able to hear the slow movement fairly well.  That evening I put on the wide channel spread stereo recording of the  first Razumovsky quartet, played by the Loewenguth Quartet. (It's in my  "Essential in Stereo" collection.) This went splendidly, although I  wasn't able to hear like I could before the operation. My mediation  sessions must be paying off, as I was largely able to *ignore* the  hallucinating tunes the kept coming up! And, this time, the scale was  normal. However, I didn't detect the end of the first and beginning of  the second movement. Somewhere after the start of the second movement,  I knew I was listening to it. I've been combining meditation with my  naps, which I'm not really supposed to do, as falling asleep destroys  the mediations. So, I set my "Shake Awake" alarm for either 20 minutes  (the length of time I'm supposed to meditate). I'm then aroused and  press the snooze button for eight minutes. I'm then, hopefully, awake  and meditate for these eight minutes. Then I press the snooze button  for a further eight minutes. (Or, sometimes I'll set the alarm for 14  minutes. 14+8+8 gives me half an hour, the length of my usual nap.) I can't really say, though, that I am becoming a better and better  meditator. The idea is to let thoughts *drift away* (don't actively  surpress them) and don't follow them up with other ideas. Too often, I  plain forget I'm supposed to meditate! I keep reminding myself but then  just go back following thoughts with further thoughts. Dr. Hennigan  said to take breaths, count them, but revert to the beginning whenever  I start following up ideas with other ideas. This I do, though  sometimes I just continue counting. What I try to do is to let a  thought come in but try to let it go by the next breath. I am not  really getting better and better at this and shall have to try harder.  Still, there was a great payoff when listening to the first two  movements of the seventh quartet. I most definitely needed the great  spiritual uplift, though my using (I think) the benefits of meditation  spoiled just listening to the music. I'll keep trying!

 Monday (July 9): Art Museum: I wandered into a guide who took us to  look at several pieces of sculpture. My hearing was fabulous! But only  when using my external, unidirectional micophone. With just the  omni-directional one that came with the sound processor, I miss just  enough words of sentences that I can't follow the whole conversation.  Even still, though, I need to keep my mind from wandering. This happens  when I am watching teevee *with* the captions running, when talking  with Sarah thinking of what to say to her, even when reading. This we  all do. Listening, even for those with normal hearing, can be extremely  difficult. It involves not just getting the words and the sentences  right but placing yourself in the mind of the speaker, knowing where he  is coming from, knowing what his Premises (Checked and Unchecked) are,  placing yourself in *his* exact knowledge situation. Then you have to  judge how open-minded your conversationalist is. If you misjudge, you  get cut off, since you are rarely in the position to make someone else  respond to you.

It's amazing how often others suddenly become "busy"! What someone with  normal hearing is able to do that I cannot is to detect cues that I am  pressing too far. I love rooting out assumptions as much as anything.  After all my handle is Premise Checker. The number of others that see  the importance of the re-examinations and just plain love doing it is  tiny. So hardly anyone initiates conversations with me or asks for my  ideas and opinions. I will be glad to talk about pedophilia, for  example. My reactions are not so much those of disgust, outrage, and  condemnation as curiosity about it. Others want me express outrage.  They want me to go through a ritual of showing outrage. I would rather  understand than judge. In some ways, though, I am pretty highly  judgmental. On the Myer-Briggs test, I come out as INTJ--Introverted,  iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging. What I judge harshly is bad thinking, my  own included, and I like to think esp. my own.

A sculpture I had not much noticed before is "The Reading Girl," white  marble on green Connemara marble plinth (I need look this up, I guess),  model 1856, carved 1861, by Pietro Magni (Milanaese, 1817-77). http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=124598+0+none http://www.drylnn.com/archives/2006/06/the_reading_gir.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/drylnn/172339266/in/set-72157594173468494/ (This is a whole set of photographs.)

http://www.lucrecci.com/myphotos/200702/20070211025.asp (Excellent  photograph, though the color is off. In reality, it's pure white.) http://www.spottie.net/natl_art/target9.html http://www.strangeday.net/snapshots/archives/001471.html

Words: I got both Greg (Monday) and Sarah (Tuesday, as I write this) to  feed me names of rivers. This is far more difficult than American  states, since they aren't so retrievable from my brain. Or from theirs.  They find it hard to think up names of rivers, too. So I'd frequently  interrupt and say, "Let's try Latin America." "Amazon." Then something  quite obscure. My second year college roommate took a course called  "History of the River Plates (pronounced platts), so he'd know a lot of  them. Try Russia. Blank. I'd sing "Yo, o, heave ho!" "The Volga." I  missed quite a few names I was fed, like Danube, Moldau, Seine. I did  better with Sarah the next day, since she and Greg chose a lot of  rivers in common.

We also did State capitals. Sarah said she never had to memorize them.  I seem to have known what they all were, but that was quite a while  ago. Neither Greg nor Sarah are always sure whether a city is in fact  the capital. I have remarked to many people that it's not important to  know the names, as the fact that only a third are the largest cities in  their states. This says a great deal about America. New York City and  Philadelphia were one the capitals, but the inland farmers revolted  about the control of coastal elites and forced the capitals to move  to--well, you see if you remember. Elites have rarely been dislodged  geographically in the rest of the world.

Phoenix, AZ Little Rock, AR Denver, CO Atlanta, GA

Honolulu, HI Boise, ID Indianopolis, IN Des Moines, IA

Boston, MA Jackson, MS Columbus, OH Oklahoma City, OK

Providence, RI Columbia, SC Salt Lake City, UT Charleston, WV

Cheyenne, WY

Norfolk displaced Richmond, VA, through population growth since 1990  and Chapel Hill moved past Raleigh, NC, through enlarging its  boundaries. Charleston, SC, looks like it may overtake Columbia in a  decade or so.

Friday, June 13. This was the first anniversary of Alice's death. We  joined one of Sarah's cousins, Cowper (pronounced Cooper) Smith, and  his wife, Cary, for lunch in Warrenton. Both of them had fathers who  were major generals during WW II, but I can't say I heard them all that  well. They continue to live at the farm next to the one that had been  in Sarah's family since 1830 but which was sold to the owner, Bill  Hazel, of the farm on the opposite side a couple of years ago. He is  the son of Sarah's grandmother's personal physician and the brother of  Til Hazel, a major real estate developer in Northern Virginia and a big  benefactor of George Mason University. We had dinner with him at one of  the Public Choice get-togethers some years back, but I think I've met  Bill but shortly.

Some thought about Alice's suicide:

I envisioned in Alice a fatal flaw in her character, an streak of  independence so great that she married a second time a 19 year old boy  who was so exploitative that he was shunned by those who knew him in  Alcoholics Anonymous as incorrigable. It is true that Alice suffered  from bipolar disorder, and that suicide is far more common among them  than among the general population. Friends came forth after we got home  and told me that either they had the disorder themselves or had family  members or close friends who did. They reported several suicides, but  most continued to live.

Envisioning that Alice had a fatal flaw did not require much  imagination. I remain certain that had she never encountered her second  husband, she would be alive still. I recovered many files from her home  desktop computer and found elaborate spread sheets detailing her  finances through April. She was engaging in wild spending sprees of  $10,000 a month, something any decent husband would have put a stop to  rather than encouraged! The records show her moving money around from  credit card to credit card to postpone a show down. This collapse of  her deep sense of frugality might have driven her to kill herself, but  she knew she had bipolar disorder. It was the behavior of her husband  during the final few days that drove her to kill herself when he had  left their apartment to purchase drugs (it's not clear whether Alice  knew this at the time but he was on a three-day crack cocaine binge)  and took their cellphone with them. She used a gun she bought for him,  having shown no interest in guns before.

Several coincidences were at work, David, an unusually evil man, coming  into Alice's life, a lack of any way make a phone call (Alice got rid  of the landline and, indeed moved from her house out of financial  desperation), her psychiatrist being out of town (Alice was about to  try a different medication), and a gun being there.

All this came out quickly before I discovered I had Michael Gelven's  article with me. Here's the paragraph that struck me the most:

"But suffering, unlike foolishness, seems to require a special kind of  effort to allow us, the audience, to affirm it. No one likes to suffer,  and indeed few of us hke to see worthy people other than ourselves  suffer. It is especially difficult to see great people suffer, since  their suffering seems to strike us as all the more outrageous, given  the nobility of their character. In order to affirm suffering, then, it  must be encased in a play and a character that reveals the remarkable  significance of suffering. Traditionally, acute observers of the tragic  plays have noted that, especially in the Greek versions, the cause of  the downfall is locked within the very germ of greatness which makes  the hero who he is. We are all familiar with the description of tragedy  as the fall of a man or woman whose very greatness contains within  itself the seeds of their own destruction. This is often called the  tragic flaw. But the analysis of such characterization is usually quite  misguided and deeply distortive. It is not because the character has a  flaw that we can then applaud his downfall, it is rather because the  very thing that makes him fall is also the thing that makes him great.  The traditional (Aristotelian) view simply has the whole thing  backward. *It is not the flaw that justifies his suffering, it is  rather the suffering that ennobles his fall.* It is remarkable, perhaps  even incredible, that such profound thinkers have so fundamentally  misread the tragedian's art; the continual misreading of this message  throughout the centuries attests to the dominance of moralistic  thinking. Only the true Dionysian or the true Christian can see through  this to grasp the deeper truth."

Alice's achievements at work, which she much never told me about, came  out, and magnificent they were. She came up with the idea of making a  detailed investigations of the patterns of breakdown of every machine  at Mead WestVaco. She was allowed to proceed, and I got a copy of her  reports. I don't know what the next stage would be, but had she spoken  to me, I would have instantly replied with an economist's view that  what matters to Mead WestVaco is profit. To find that out, one needs to  specify the whole pathway of making things. If one machine breaks down,  will it hold up the line? If so, then even having a few strategically  located redundant machines might be a good idea. One should not rush to  blame indivudals at the plant for breakdowns but consider them mostly  as random events.

This would involve Alice learning about queueing theory, about which I  read a little book before she was born. This theory was founded by  Agner Erlang for the Copenhagen Telephone Exchange in 1909. The idea is  to calculate the number of lines needed to insure that, say, 95% of  calls go through except on Mother's Day and Christmas. The profit angle  comes in by reckoning the cost of these lines versus what customers are  willing to pay for the service thus provided.

Who besides telephone companies use queueing theory? Remembering that  what are called Poisson processes feature in the underlying  mathematics, I googled <"poisson process" site:ford.com> (and ditto for  a bunch of other companies) to see whether something like what Alice  might have done was being done. I didn't find any, except for some  abstract papers, none suggesting that queueing theory was being  practiced. So had Alice lived, and talked to her father, she might well  have not only done much for Mead WestVaco but have begun a revolution  in business, simply by shifting away from blame models to probability  processes. This is not idle thinking on my part. Something so obvious  as inventory control does not go back to the days of Nebuchanezzar but  to Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors in the 1920s (My Life with General  Motors). Alice certainly would have had much to live for. Recall that  Beethoven thought of committing suicide when he realized how  profounding deaf he was becoming, but decided at the end to live for  the sake of his art (Heiligenstadt Testament).

So because of Alice's considerable achievement--her boss said very few  engineers accomplish as much over their entire career than Alice did in  her short one--and potential for turning this into a much greater  achievement, I saw a nobility in her that ennobled her flaw, a Gelven  put it.

How do I feel now? Of course, her death has left a hole that can never  be filled. Of course, I miss the deeper love that would have come over  the years. The shock, guilt, and anger have run their courses. Except  that I have a feeling of guilt now that Alice was not communicative on  any deep level. She, unlike her mother and sister, did not relish the  freewheeling, sometimes noisy discussions that go about freely in our  household, but rather withdrew. Adelaide could get her to open up, but  not Sarah and still less me. For this I blame myself, as I do have the  same problem with others. Besides three or four people at work, I  almost never get visited in my office, a pattern that persists  elsewhere. Thank goodness for the Internet, since I can communicate  with more open-minded people.

Right now, I feel rather miffed that Alice and I did not communicate  well, and now I am not so sure we ever would have. A great many people  do ignore me, so many that I suspect it's something about me. Alice  should have opened up and told me she felt her life was in ruins, but  she didn't. Sarah assuaged my feelings by reminding me that Alice  didn't even call Adelaide, with whom she was exceptionally close. Nor  did she listen to her many friends in Charleston who unanimously warned  her against David.

I'll don't think I'll ever truly understand what was going on in  Alice's tormented mind, since I have never felt, except perhaps briefly  and always in full awareness that it would pass, her torment. Should I  say that it wasn't the nobility of character that Gelven's essay, the  deepest essay I have ever read, describes and that it was just hopeful  thinking on my part and that I ought to admit to myself that Alice was  simply stupid in marrying David. Her boyfriend in engineering school  was rude to her and kept her from dating other men. She should have  found any number of male students there, where men vastly outnumber  women, and one who shares her kind of nerdishness. And her first  husband, while a nice guy, would not do his share in their marriage.  Maybe it was his own depression, but Alice eventually divorced him,  only to find another man, a boy of nineteen really, who was  incomparably worse. This is stupidity triple time, not nobility, I  not understand this, but it is not entirely uncommon.

Could I have been a better father? Certainly, I should have realized  much earlier, with Aristotle, that character is something instilled at  a very early age, not something consciously accepted. I have a close  friend, Richard, an Evangelical, who raised his children strictly. They  should have been Generation X (a nomad or reactive generation, like the  Lost Generation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writings), like Alice and  Adelaide definitely seem to belong to. Would a better upbringing have  saved her? I can honestly say only that, possibly, it might have, but  not with enough assurance to feel permanently badly about what might  have happened in retrospect. I might as well claim that we should have  had knowledge of Sarah's and my genetic makeup to have not risked  having children. Of course, such knowledge was not available in 1975,  when Sarah became pregnant with Alice, and I do not think such  knowledge is available today.

No, I don't have much of a grip on the concept of stupidity. Nobody  does, but even if it's just a word, it's one that should be retained in  the language. This is a terrible thing to say about a daughter that  died a terrible death, but by no means am I trying to blame her. It's  just that I can't express myself any better.

The Jim Lehrer News Hour. It watched it, but remember nothing about it.  I might have jotted down a note or two.

Afterwards, and in memory of Alice, I put on the same great work of  affirmation I played after her death, the German Requiem of Johannes  Brahms. I could barely hear it but did notice when some powerful  phrases came on during the first movement. I sensed, barely, the coming  of the great fugal passage in the sixth movement, then one that  invariably brings tears and rejoicing when it come on after about an  hour during a long run:

Herr, Du bist würdig zu nehmen Preis und Ehre und Kraft, den Du hast alle Dinge erschaften, und durch Deinen WIllen haben sie des Wesen und sind geschaffen.

Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created. (Revelation 4:11).

But not this time.

Tuesday, July 17: The Sound and Beyond software finally arrived! It is  a most terrific set of exercises, and I am determined to spend a full  hour a day on it at work (staying late in case I have a full plate of  work to do). There are several parts to it. I went through tests to  determine which the level at which I should do the exercises, which  consist of click on the correct choice. Then I go through them. Here  are the parts:

1. Pure tone discrimination: I'm at the top level already. What I do is  chose the odd person out among three sounds. Now sometimes it seems  easy, when one of the tones sounds like a buzz to me, but sometimes  this doesn't work. I got 100% on the test, but still I need to do the  exercises.

2. Environmental sounds: these involve picking one out of two sounds,  like a restaurant and a dog barking. I'm just at level 1 here. I got  44% right on the test, while random guessing would be 25%

3. Male/female voice recognition. This is incredibly difficult, which  goes to show how badly the sounds come in to my cyber ear. The  differences are so small that I'm at the first level. I got 52% right  on the test, while just guessing would be 50%. I am picking up during  the training sessions and will report when I take the test again. There  can be anywhere between 16 and 50 choices to make, depending on the  test. I got 77% right on the latest training session, but what counts  will be the next (and second) time I take the test. The software has 48  sounds.

4. Vowel recognition. Also at level 1. If I make a mistake, only then  are the words themsevles revealed to me, like pit and put. On the  (first: so far I have taken only one) test, I did not do any better  than chance (5%). These turn out to be words: had, hod, hawed, head,  hayed, heard, hid, heed, hoed, hood, hud, who'd, except that I never  see them! Actually, there are 4396 sounds. I'll be busy for quite a  while indeed!

5. Consonant recognition. Same. There are 4548 sounds here. (Another  print out says 4580 sounds. "I don't know. Go ask your pop," says one  of the Dr. Seuss books.

6. Word discrimination. No levels here. Here's my percentage correct.  25% is what I'd get were I simply to guess randomly:

Animals 76% (cow, horse Food    72% Color   86% Family  82% Number  80% Times   88%

7. Everday sentences. I'm at level 1, but got 96% right, while 25%  would be the rate by chance. It was suggested that I use the highest  level, but that was too hard. So down to level 1, for a while. The  sentences look so different, but they are quite hard. At the top level,  it seems that the sentences are the same but there's noise or something  that makes chosing much more difficult.

8. Nusic appreciation. Two parts but no levels. a. Musical instrument.  I get to chose which of four instruments is being played. The drum is  easy! I got 39% on the test, as opposed to 25% by chance. b. Familiar  melodies. I get to chose which of four melodies are being played. I got  only 50% right, twice that of chance. I should have done better, but  the problem is that many of these familiar melodies are not familiar at  all, like Itsy Bitsy, Amazing Grace (not in the Episcopal hymnal, so I  barely know it: I've *never* heard "We Shall Overcome," which goes to  show how isolated I am!), Rock a Bye Baby, Jack and Jill (I know the  poem only), This Old Man, Clock Tick, and Wedding March (it must be  either Wagner or Mendelssohn, but I can't tell which). When I can hear  much more normally, I should be able to do better.

What is esp. terrifc about this software is that it is random. When  Sarah or Greg drill me on words, the words do not come randomly.  Oftentimes, my driller will think of a word suggested by the previous  word. And I quite often thing of the same suggested word.

Friday, July 20: All My Children. Back after two weeks. Adam's son J.R.  refused to accept any of Adam's stock and got accused by Adam of  forswearing it so that he would (somehow) be better able to win a  lawsuit against Zach to get the $100 million back. I don't understand  it.

A friend came over for the weekend, so I missed Jim Lehrer. I've taken  to using my external microphone for my cyberear, and sometimes a  hearing aid in my meat ear. The time has come, I think, to hear as best  as I can and postpone the struggle to hear and thus retrain my brain  till other times. Still, I have often found my friend hard to  hear, including this time. Ditto for a gathering at Sarah's church on  Sunday evening, where we met the new deacon and her husband, who is a  Federal prosecutor for all sorts of drug issues, from illegal sales of  presciptions over the Net from American sites (he can't stop sales from  countries that don't recognize our drug laws, but most of the violators  are based in America. Not enough enforcers to really make a dent. If  you have a legal prescription, it's legal to buy prescriptions from  Canada, I learned.) to controlled substances. He does think that, were  these drugs entirely legal, there would be an increase in their use,  even discounting the fact that so many dealers get others hooked so as  to finance their own habits. Just what the sheer medical effects would  be of having a cheap source of standardized, uncontaminated heroin  would be he doesn't exactly know. I pointed out that the legalization  advocates have their own studies and the opponents opposite studies. He  agreed. An honest man. The new deacon spoke of her getting a call to  the ministry, and we spoke about several theological matters. All in  all I heard pretty well.

Thursday, July 26: I went with Sharon to the Hirshhorn Museum and we  reflect on the merits of modern art. She likes mostly the early modern  art, as do I. After World War II, it's mostly an endless succession of  *movements* and more lately it consists of artists deliberately making  eclectic combinations of movements. It seems rather pointless, but I  strive to understand the biological roots of the urge to make art and  also what sort of Darwinian process goes into selecting who does and  who doesn't get exhibited at the various modern art museums. Maybe King  Solomon said it all:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,  nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet  riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but  time and chance happeneth unto them all. --Ecclesiastes 9:11 (977 B.C.)

Friday, July 27:

All My Children: No Adam this week. This show may be getting sillier  and sillier. Both Greenlee and Kendall were in the hospital. It looks  like Greenlee may have kidnapped the baby of Ryan, her former husband,  and Annie, his new wife, and got into a car accident. The baby is  struggling for survival. Jack visited Kendall, indicating I know not  what. (A check in Wikipedia reveals that he married her for the second  time in 2006.) And Jake visited Greenlee. I had admired Jake's  manliness, but with him falling for the self-centered Greenlee was just  too much. It turns out, though, that Greenlee is his daughter. In real  life, they were born in 1951 and 1973.

I've pretty much decided this show is gotten so silly that I'm just  going to use it for training purposes and not look at the captions  (except for Adam) and just make of the action what I can. When the  camera is not focusing on the speaker, as sometimes happens, I'll watch  the captions. I seem to get a good deal of the action this way anyhow.  This is a *daily* show, which Alice said I really need to watch once a  week. But we're going out to Colorado for a week to see Mom Mom (88 and  cheerful), my brother Dick and his family, and my longtime friend Roy  Dent. So it will probably be another two weeks before I see this show  again. I am grateful for Wikipedia for clarifying many things, even  though it doesn't summarize individual shows.

The Jim Lehrer News Hour: Brooks and Shields blathered about Hillary,  the Obamination, and Gonzales. Nothing about the stock market drop of  five percent in two days, down from a historic high just a week ago.  This may be just as well. When the stocks go up, the reporters say "so  many shares *bought*." When they go down, they say "so many shares  *sold*"!

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Sunday 2007 July 8

It was Ron Miller's funeral, not Ron Murray's. I changed it below, after a friend wondered what happened to the Murray we both know from college. He's very much alive. Working for Microsoft since the 1970s and getting in on stock options, he has done well for himself and even bought an airport. Having run into such headaches with the local government, he bailed out. We caught up with Ron on his visit to D.C. (just about everyone comes through the rent-seeking capital of the world). Wealth has not gotten the least bit to his head. He's still very much the same Ron we knew: kindly, humorous, and ever read to explain anything. He'd have made a great teacher.

Dr. Hennigan coached us on meditation (this was the day after my visit to Andrea). The basic idea is to let your mind relax. Have only neutral thoughts. Do not follow up thoughts with other thoughts. Breathe in and out slowly. Count to ten. Start over. If a thought comes, don't actively try to push it aside. Rather, let them drift away.

My twice daily meditation sessions seem to be having good effect. It's not that I'm all stressed out. With a resting heart rate of 50-60 and blood pressure something like 60/100 or 70/110, I'm not a likely stroke or heart attack victim. I do have high-normal cholesterol levels. Probably genetic. High cholesterol is only an "indicator" of heart problems, so taking drastic measures to lower it won't nec. lower one's risk of heart problems. Who knows what the technical name for my death will be? The older notion of dying of old age was really a better one. Things go wrong as one ages in no particular order. With some, it is indeed the heart that gives out. Or it could be that the body is no longer adept at warding off cancer. My sense of smell is almost as bad as my sense of hearing and is likely due to random aging rather than pipe smoking, which reduces life expectancy by six to eight weeks, by the way. I remember well the Fryer's Special Smokynge Mixture I used in high school through graduate school until Fryer's went out of existence, maybe many years before. Its last listing in a directory of British companies was something like 1958! I consumed my last tin a year after my marriage in 1968. No truer words have been written than that on the tin, "By the inspired addition of oriental to other wisely selected tobaccos, this master-blend is food for the spirit and a subtle stimulus for contemplative minds." I am reminded of a statement of the seven stages of life:

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms; Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice, In fair round belly with good capon lin'd, With eyes severe and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances; And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

--Jaques (Act II, Scene VII, As You Like It, lines 139-166)

Friday (June 23)

There's not a whole, whole lot to report, really. I have been loyally meditating, or at least setting time aside twice a day for twenty minutes. It is *not* easy, esp. for someone like me (I think) to stop thinking. I must, must concentrate on letting thoughts drift away and not just impatiently wait for the twenty-minute period to end! It does seem to be working. I can get a whole movement of a Beethoven Sonata before the tunes start coming in when I'm out jogging. I'm going through cassette tapes I made of Robert Silverman's recordings again, and this time (until the tunes come in, that is) I'm appreciating the fine probing, analytical performances he makes. And sometimes I hear over the tunes and hear Beethoven again, esp. when the music gets quiet, allowing me to hook in again. I think the meditation sessions are beginning to give me control over the tunes, and this is excellent. Earlier this week, I put on the Bach Brandenburg concerti (that wonderful Casals/Marlboro recording, a gloriously robust, old-fashioned big-tune performance in which the musicians sung their hearts out for the legendary old man, who by that time had stopped performing on the cello in public. These are the Brandenburgs we sneakily love, as opposed to the lean "authentic" performances we are told to (merely) admire. Give me Casals! I do not feel guilty about it. When I first got these recordings in college, it came with a bonus disc of rehearsal excerpts. Casals has got to be the most enthusiastic grunter ever. My roommate disdained these recordings--this was long before HIP (historically informed performances) came along--and told me I liked them only because of the rehearsal excerpts, the first movement of the second Brandenburg most noticeably. He was wrong: they have remained my favorites ever since.), listening to them out of both ears. This was a massive failure, for my hallucinating tunes simply sped up to match the tempo of the music. All My Children: Erica and Jack kiss, and out pops a reality photographer, which makes Jack mad. Zach is going after Adam's fortune. Jim Lehrer News Hour: blather about Congress passing new laws to require car makers to make their cars deliver more miles per gallon. Nowhere was there anyone who understood the elements of supply and demand.

Wednesday (June 27): The 41st Annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival opened. Three exhibits this year. I went first to the one about Northern Ireland. I asked a women from Old Bushmill's, the oldest licensed distillery in the world (1608) Irish Whiskey about Creationist in Northern Ireland. My thinking was that, if there was any place outside of America where this would be a big issue, it would be in Northern Ireland: the Prots would oppose Darwin there just to have one more thing to disagree with the Roman Catholics about. Roman Catholics do not dispute the evolution of species, though they maintain that the Lord infused human beings with souls. (I am not clear how far back this infusion is said to have gone.) Protestants are not centrally directed and hold that every backwoods Baptist preacher knows as much about first and last things as the Pope, to which I heartily agree, to wit, zero for both. Some of them interpret Genesis to mean that not only did God create all kinds of beasts and fish (thus some translations, though the original King James says "made after their kind") as forbidden subsequent speciation. (Linneaus came to conclude that speciation occurs but not new genera.) They are divided into Young Earth Creationists, who further take literally "And the evening and the morning were the first day" (Gen. 1:5), etc. for following days (as indeed the Hebrew bo'-ker bzw.'ereb means dawn bzw. evening or dusk), while the Old Earth Creationists hold that these days are of indefinite duration. I am reading a book now by Claire Asquith, _Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare_ (2005), which Sarah gave me for Father's Day and which makes the Stratford Man out to be a closet Roman Catholic. Perhaps, but in reality Shakespeare was a skeptic like Montaigne. He lived in a period between the fall of the Papist hegemony and the rise of science, what was indeed to come forth with explanations of things. He portrayed the world as he saw it and envisioned a natural moral order, the violation of which would bring its own punishments, ones that need not be inflicted from on high. (See Colin McGinn, _Shakespeare's Philosophy_ (2006). Outside of Northern Ireland, we have done away with religious warfare that was still raging in Shakespeare's day by privatizing the whole business. You can argue to your heart's content about Young Earth vs. Old Earth Creationism or whether supreme unction is a sacrament and no one will bother you. It turned out that, no, Creationists are not enough known in Northern Ireland for a representative of Bushmill's to have heard of them. I'm pleased to report that Bushmill's makes a single-malt Irish whiskey. Scotch whiskey differs from Irish whiskey in that when the barley used for Scotch whisky (without the e) is roasted before fermentation begins peat is added to the fire to give an earthy flavor. Fermentation results in a beer, which is then distilled into whisk(e)y. I asked whether Old Bushmill's sells a beer that would have gone into whiskey, and she said no. Somehow or another, and this was thirty or so years ago, I've purchased both Irish and Scotch beers right in Washington, D.C.! Beer sold in the United States is mostly fermented barley, while whiskey, while bourbon (NOT confined to Kentucky) by law must contain 51% corn in its beer. I don't recall ever having a corn beer.

The rechargable battery of my processor went unexpectedly dead, leading me to think that one of them had prematurely worn out. (This turned out not to be the case.) I then went to an exhibit about the many folks along the Mekong River which is over 3000 miles long and runs from Red China to the bottom of Red Vietnam. Hundreds of languages and many cultures. These two exhibits took an hour. I spend a full hour at the third exhibit, about the settler of early Virginia, starting in Jamestown next and managed to hear out of my meat ear when I asked for a copy of a fine road-map sized map of the early peopling of Virginia from Kent, England, whose representatives had a tent. I can get a free one at the souvenir tent, she said. I swung through the Mekong River tents to the souvenir tent and managed to hear a representative tell me to leave because of an impending thunderstorm, and this out of my meat ear alone! One good thing about my cyborg experience is that I have become much more attentive and a better lip reader. The souvenir tent was also shut down for the duration of the thunderstorm, which never came. Why haven't the folks at the Smithsonian who put on these festivals learned about Washington, D.C., weather?

Here's an article that sounds hopeful for relearning how to hear music. I don't think I've quite ready for these measures yet. The article appeared in 2005 November. I added remarks to the article before I sent it to my list.

Sarah found this article for me, as well as Mike's book, which she spotted at Daedalus Books a mail-order place wherefrom I have placed several orders over maybe 20 years but which opened a store only a couple of years ago. This was our first visit, on the way back from seeing a psychiatrist to determine whether I was sane and disposed toward a cochlear implant. (My morbid and obsessive attachment to reality, which does me no good at all in the bureaucracy, didn't count against me, since at Sarah's behest I didn't bring it up.)

My success with listening to music is not as good as others have reported, so I may have to go down the route Mike so well describes below and try out different software. I'm a willing guinea pig, since the imperishable truths of Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach are just as important as hearing possible, rumble-bumble at staff meetings, and teevee evangelists and right-wing talk radio hosts.

Bolero got its first three recordings within a couple of months of each other. The one by the composer himself is mostly of documentary interest, and it wasn't even released on 78s. My favorite conductor, Willem Mengelberg, made one of the other three, but best of all (indeed the best I've ever heard) was conducted by Piero Coppola, an Italian who would not give up his citizenship when he moved to France and hence was denied a major career conducting concert orchestras. Instead, he put his efforts toward making recordings with recording orchestras, such as the Orchestre Symphonique du Gramophon. I do not in general like French orchestral music (though I do like the chamber music very much, the piano music less still, and the vocal hardly at all). Coppola made the first and (as so often happens) still the best and most idiomatic recordings of French orchestral music, only a goodly fraction of which has ever been reissued. (Grab his Saint-Saens organ symphony. When I put it on, I knew within thirty seconds that all norther recordings would be destined for the garbarage heap. My hearing loss means that I don't hear the high frequencies and so miss out on the upper overtones of more modern recordings. But getting idiomatically in tune with the composer and being a creator in one's own right counts for more than sound. And being in tune with the composer means making his music a springboard for a second creation. Jacques Thibaud's (acoustic) recording of the Bach second violin concerto is far, far from what Bach would have heard but he picks up the ingredient of keeping the music moving better than all subsequent recordings. [end of my remarks]

Michael Chorost: My Bionic Quest for Boléro http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/bolero_pr.html

Michael Chorost (michael@chorost.com) is the author of Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human.

He's been haunted by Ravel's masterpiece since he lost his hearing. A deaf man's pursuit of the perfect audio upgrade.

With one listen, I was hooked. I was a 15-year-old suburban New Jersey nerd, racked with teenage lust but too timid to ask for a date. When I came across Boléro among the LPs in my parents' record collection, I put it on the turntable. It hit me like a neural thunderstorm, titanic and glorious, each cycle building to a climax and waiting but a beat before launching into the next.

I had no idea back then of Boléro's reputation as one of the most famous orchestral recordings in the world. When it was first performed at the Paris Opera in 1928, the 15-minute composition stunned the audience. Of the French composer, Maurice Ravel, a woman in attendance reportedly cried out, "He's mad ... he's mad!" One critic wrote that Bolero "departs from a thousand years of tradition."

I sat in my living room alone, listening. Boléro starts simply enough, a single flute accompanied by a snare drum: da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum, dum-dum, da-da-da-dum. The same musical clause repeats 17 more times, each cycle adding instruments, growing louder and more insistent, until the entire orchestra roars in an overpowering finale of rhythm and sound. Musically, it was perfect for my ear. It had a structure that I could easily grasp and enough variation to hold my interest.

It took a lot to hold my interest; I was nearly deaf at the time. In 1964, my mother contracted rubella while pregnant with me. Hearing aids allowed me to understand speech well enough, but most music was lost on me. Boléro was one of the few pieces I actually enjoyed. A few years later, I bought the CD and played it so much it eventually grew pitted and scratched. It became my touchstone. Every time I tried out a new hearing aid, I'd check to see if Boléro sounded OK. If it didn't, the hearing aid went back.

And then, on July 7, 2001, at 10:30 am, I lost my ability to hear Boléro - and everything else. While I was waiting to pick up a rental car in Reno, I suddenly thought the battery in my hearing aid had died. I replaced it. No luck. I switched hearing aids. Nothing.

I got into my rental car and drove to the nearest emergency room. For reasons that are still unknown, my only functioning ear had suffered "sudden-onset deafness." I was reeling, trying to navigate in a world where the volume had been turned down to zero.

But there was a solution, a surgeon at Stanford Hospital told me a week later, speaking slowly so I could read his lips. I could have a computer surgically installed in my skull. A cochlear implant, as it is known, would trigger my auditory nerves with 16 electrodes that snaked inside my inner ear. It seemed drastic, and the $50,000 price tag was a dozen times more expensive than a high-end hearing aid. I went home and cried. Then I said yes.

For the next two months, while awaiting surgery, I was totally deaf except for a thin trickle of sound from my right ear. I had long since become accustomed to not hearing my own voice when I spoke. It happened whenever I removed my hearing aid. But that sensation was as temporary as waking up without my glasses. Now, suddenly, the silence wasn't optional. At my job as a technical writer in Silicon Valley, I struggled at meetings. Using the phone was out of the question.

In early September, the surgeon drilled a tunnel through an inch and a half of bone behind my left ear and inserted the 16 electrodes along the auditory nerve fibers in my cochlea. He hollowed a well in my skull about the size of three stacked quarters and snapped in the implant.

When the device was turned on a month after surgery, the first sentence I heard sounded like "Zzzzzz szz szvizzz ur brfzzzzzz?" My brain gradually learned how to interpret the alien signal. Before long, "Zzzzzz szz szvizzz ur brfzzzzzz?" became "What did you have for breakfast?" After months of practice, I could use the telephone again, even converse in loud bars and cafeterias. In many ways, my hearing was better than it had ever been. Except when I listened to music.

I could hear the drums of Boléro just fine. But the other instruments were flat and dull. The flutes and soprano saxophones sounded as though someone had clapped pillows over them. The oboes and violins had become groans. It was like walking color-blind through a Paul Klee exhibit. I played Boléro again and again, hoping that practice would bring it, too, back to life. It didn't.

The implant was embedded in my head; it wasn't some flawed hearing aid I could just send back. But it was a computer. Which meant that, at least in theory, its effectiveness was limited only by the ingenuity of software engineers. As researchers learn more about how the ear works, they continually revise cochlear implant software. Users await new releases with all the anticipation of Apple zealots lining up for the latest Mac OS.

About a year after I received the implant, I asked one implant engineer how much of the device's hardware capacity was being used. "Five percent, maybe." He shrugged. "Ten, tops."

I was determined to use that other 90 percent. I set out on a crusade to explore the edges of auditory science. For two years tugging on the sleeves of scientists and engineers around the country, offering myself as a guinea pig for their experiments. I wanted to hear Boléro again.

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. For centuries, the best available hearing aid was a horn, or ear trumpet, which people held to their ears to funnel in sound. In 1952, the first electronic hearing aid was developed. It worked by blasting amplified sound into a damaged ear. However it (and the more advanced models that followed) could help only if the user had some residual hearing ability, just as glasses can help only those who still have some vision. Cochlear implants, on the other hand, bypass most of the ear's natural hearing mechanisms. The device's electrodes directly stimulate nerve endings in the ear, which transmit sound information to the brain. Since the surgery can eliminate any remaining hearing, implants are approved for use only in people who can't be helped by hearing aids. The first modern cochlear implants went on the market in Australia in 1982, and by 2004 approximately 82,500 people worldwide had been fitted with one.

When technicians activated my cochlear implant in October 2001, they gave me a pager-sized processor that decoded sound and sent it to a headpiece that clung magnetically to the implant underneath my skin (see "Reprogramming the Inner Ear," page 154). The headpiece contained a radio transmitter, which sent the processor's data to the implant at roughly 1 megabit per second. Sixteen electrodes curled up inside my cochlea strobed on and off to stimulate my auditory nerves. The processor's software gave me eight channels of auditory resolution, each representing a frequency range. The more channels the software delivers, the better the user can distinguish between sounds of different pitches.

Eight channels isn't much compared with the capacity of a normal ear, which has the equivalent of 3,500 channels. Still, eight works well enough for speech, which doesn't have much pitch variation. Music is another story. The lowest of my eight channels captured everything from 250 hertz (about middle C on the piano) to 494 hertz (close to the B above middle C), making it nearly impossible for me to distinguish among the 11 notes in that range. Every note that fell into a particular channel sounded the same to me.

So in mid-2002, nine months after activation, I upgraded to a program called Hi-Res, which gave me 16 channels - double the resolution! An audiologist plugged my processor into her laptop and uploaded the new code. I suddenly had a better ear, without surgery. In theory, I would now be able to distinguish among tones five notes apart instead of 11.

I eagerly plugged my Walkman into my processor and turned it on. Boléro did sound better. But after a day or two, I realized that "better" still wasn't good enough. The improvement was small, like being in that art gallery again and seeing only a gleam of pink here, a bit of blue there. I wasn't hearing the Boléro I remembered.

At a cochlear implant conference in 2003, I heard Jay Rubinstein, a surgeon and researcher at the University of Washington, say that it took at least 100 channels of auditory information to make music pleasurable. My jaw dropped. No wonder. I wasn't even close.

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.

An audiologist at the University of Iowa working with Rubenstein handed me a processor loaded with the stochastic-resonance software. The first thing I heard was a loud whoosh - the random noise. It sounded like a cranked-up electric fan. But in about 30 seconds, the noise went away. I was puzzled. "You've adapted to it," the technician told me. The nervous system can habituate to any kind of everyday sound, but it adjusts especially quickly to noise with no variation. Stochastic-resonance noise is so content-free that the brain tunes it out in seconds.

In theory, the noise would add just enough energy to incoming sound to make faint details audible. In practice, everything I heard became rough and gritty. My own voice sounded vibrato, mechanical, and husky - even a little querulous, as if I were perpetually whining.

We tried some quick tests to take my newly programmed ear out for a spin. It performed slightly better in some ways, slightly worse in others - but there was no dramatic improvement. The audiologist wasn't surprised. She told me that, in most cases, a test subject's brain will take weeks or even months to make sense of the additional information. Furthermore, the settings she chose were only an educated guess at what might work for my particular physiology. Everyone is different. Finding the right setting is like fishing for one particular cod in the Atlantic.

The university loaned me the processor to test for a few months. As soon as I was back in the hotel, I tried my preferred version of Boléro, a 1982 recording conducted by Charles Dutoit with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. It sounded different, but not better. Sitting at my keyboard, I sighed a little and tapped out an email thanking Rubinstein and encouraging him to keep working on it.

Music depends on low frequencies for its richness and mellowness. The lowest-pitched string on a guitar vibrates at 83 hertz, but my Hi-Res software, like the eight-channel model, bottoms out at 250 hertz. I do hear something when I pluck a string, but it's not actually an 83-hertz sound. Even though the string is vibrating at 83 times per second, portions of it are vibrating faster, giving rise to higher-frequency notes called harmonics. The harmonics are what I hear.

The engineers haven't gone below 250 hertz because the world's low-pitched sounds - air conditioners, engine rumbles - interfere with speech perception. Furthermore, increasing the total frequency range means decreasing resolution, because each channel has to accommodate more frequencies. Since speech perception has been the main goal during decades of research, the engineers haven't given much thought to representing low frequencies. Until Philip Loizou came along.

Loizou and his team of postdocs at the University of Texas at Dallas are trying to figure out ways to give cochlear implant users access to more low frequencies. A week after my frustratingly inconclusive encounter with stochastic resonance, I traveled to Dallas and asked Loizou why the government would give him a grant to develop software that increases musical appreciation. "Music lifts up people's spirits, helps them forget things," he told me in his mild Greek accent. "The goal is to have the patient live a normal life, not to be deprived of anything."

Loizou is trying to negotiate a trade-off: narrowing low-frequency channels while widening higher-frequency channels. But his theories only hinted at what specific configurations might work best, so Loizou was systematically trying a range of settings to see which ones got the better results.

The team's software ran only on a desktop computer, so on my visit to Dallas I had to be plugged directly into the machine. After a round of testing, a postdoc assured me, they would run Boléro through their software and pipe it into my processor via Windows Media Player.

I spent two and a half days hooked up to the computer, listening to endless sequences of tones - none of it music - in a windowless cubicle. Which of two tones sounded lower? Which of two versions of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" was more recognizable? Did this string of notes sound like a march or a waltz? It was exacting, high-concentration work - like taking an eye exam that lasted for two days. My responses produced reams of data that they would spend hours analyzing.

Forty minutes before my cab back to the airport was due, we finished the last test and the postdoc fired up the programs he needed to play Boléro. Some of the lower pitches I'd heard in the previous two days had sounded rich and mellow, and I began thinking wistfully about those bassoons and oboes. I felt a rising sense of anticipation and hope.

I waited while the postdoc tinkered with the computer. And waited. Then I noticed the frustrated look of a man trying to get Windows to behave. "I do this all the time," he said, half to himself. Windows Media Player wouldn't play the file.

I suggested rebooting and sampling Boléro through a microphone. But the postdoc told me he couldn't do that in time for my plane. A later flight wasn't an option; I had to be back in the Bay Area. I was crushed. I walked out of the building with my shoulders slumped. Scientifically, the visit was a great success. But for me, it was a failure. On the flight home, I plugged myself into my laptop and listened sadly to Boléro with Hi-Res. It was like eating cardboard.

It's June 2005, a few weeks after my visit to Dallas, and I'm ready to try again. A team of engineers at Advanced Bionics, one of three companies in the world that makes bionic ears, is working on a new software algorithm for so-called virtual channels. I hop on a flight to their Los Angeles headquarters, my CD player in hand.

My implant has 16 electrodes, but the virtual-channels software will make my hardware act like there are actually 121. Manipulating the flow of electricity to target neurons between each electrode creates the illusion of seven new electrodes between each actual pair, similar to the way an audio engineer can make a sound appear to emanate from between two speakers. Jay Rubinstein had told me two years ago that it would take at least 100 channels to create good music perception. I'm about to find out if he's right.

I'm sitting across a desk from Gulam Emadi, an Advanced Bionics researcher. He and an audiologist are about to fit me with the new software. Leo Litvak, who has spent three years developing the program, comes in to say hello. He's one of those people of whom others often say, "If Leo can't do it, it probably can't be done." And yet it would be hard to find a more modest person. Were it not for his clothes, which mark him as an Orthodox Jew, he would simply disappear in a roomful of people. Litvak tilts his head and smiles hello, shyly glances at Emadi's laptop, and sidles out.

At this point, I'm rationing my emotions like Spock. Hi-Res was a disappointment. Stochastic resonance remains a big if. The low-frequency experiment in Dallas was a bust. Emadi dinks with his computer and hands me my processor with the new software in it. I plug it into myself, plug my CD player into it, and press Play.

Boléro starts off softly and slowly, meandering like a breeze through the trees. Da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum, dum-dum, da-da-da-dum. I close my eyes to focus, switching between Hi-Res and the new software every 20 or 30 seconds by thumbing a blue dial on my processor.

My God, the oboes d'amore do sound richer and warmer. I let out a long, slow breath, coasting down a river of sound, waiting for the soprano saxophones and the piccolos. They'll come in around six minutes into the piece - and it's only then that I'll know if I've truly got it back.

As it turns out, I couldn't have chosen a better piece of music for testing new implant software. Some biographers have suggested that Boléro's obsessive repetition is rooted in the neurological problems Ravel had started to exhibit in 1927, a year before he composed the piece. It's still up for debate whether he had early-onset Alzheimer's, a left-hemisphere brain lesion, or something else.

But Boléro's obsessiveness, whatever its cause, is just right for my deafness. Over and over the theme repeats, allowing me to listen for specific details in each cycle.

At 5:59, the soprano saxophones leap out bright and clear, arcing above the snare drum. I hold my breath.

At 6:39, I hear the piccolos. For me, the stretch between 6:39 and 7:22 is the most Boléro of Boléro, the part I wait for each time. I concentrate. It sounds ... right.

Hold on. Don't jump to conclusions. I backtrack to 5:59 and switch to Hi-Res. That heart-stopping leap has become an asthmatic whine. I backtrack again and switch to the new software. And there it is again, that exultant ascent. I can hear Boléro's force, its intensity and passion. My chin starts to tremble.

I open my eyes, blinking back tears. "Congratulations," I say to Emadi. "You have done it." And I reach across the desk with absurd formality and shake his hand.

There's more technical work to do, more progress to be made, but I'm completely shattered. I keep zoning out and asking Emadi to repeat things. He passes me a box of tissues. I'm overtaken by a vast sensation of surprise. I did it. For years I pestered researchers and asked questions. Now I'm running 121 channels and I can hear music again.

That evening, in the airport, sitting numbly at the gate, I listen to Boléro again. I'd never made it through more than three or four minutes of the piece on Hi-Res before getting bored and turning it off. Now, I listen to the end, following the narrative, hearing again its holy madness.

I pull out the Advanced Bionics T-shirt that the team gave me and dab at my eyes.

During the next few days I walk around in a haze of disbelief, listening to Boléro over and over to prove to myself that I really am hearing it again. But Boléro is just one piece of music. Jonathan Berger, head of Stanford's music department, tells me in an email, "There's not much of interest in terms of structure - it's a continuous crescendo, no surprises, no subtle interplay between development and contrast."

"In fact," he continues, "Ravel was not particularly happy that this study in orchestration became his big hit. It pales in comparison to any of his other music in terms of sophistication, innovation, grace, and depth."

So now it's time to try out music with sophistication, innovation, grace, and depth. But I don't know where to begin. I need an expert with first-rate equipment, a huge music collection, and the ability to pick just the right pieces for my newly reprogrammed ear. I put the question to craigslist - "Looking for a music geek." Within hours, I hear from Tom Rettig, a San Francisco music producer.

In his studio, Rettig plays me Ravel's String Quartet in F Major and Philip Glass' String Quartet no. 5. I listen carefully, switching between the old software and the new. Both compositions sound enormously better on 121 channels. But when Rettig plays music with vocals, I discover that having 121 channels hasn't solved all my problems. While the crescendos in Dulce Pontes' Cano do Mar sound louder and clearer, I hear only white noise when her voice comes in. Rettig figures that relatively simple instrumentals are my best bet - pieces where the instruments don't overlap too much - and that flutes and clarinets work well for me. Cavalcades of brass tend to overwhelm me and confuse my ear.

And some music just leaves me cold: I can't even get through Kraftwerk's Tour de France. I wave impatiently to Rettig to move on. (Later, a friend tells me it's not the software - Kraftwerk is just dull. It makes me think that for the first time in my life I might be developing a taste in music.)

Listening to Boléro more carefully in Rettig's studio reveals other bugs. The drums sound squeaky - how can drums squeak? - and in the frenetic second half of the piece, I still have trouble separating the instruments.

After I get over the initial awe of hearing music again, I discover that it's harder for me to understand ordinary speech than it was before I went to virtual channels. I report this to Advanced Bionics, and my complaint is met by a rueful shaking of heads. I'm not the first person to say that, they tell me. The idea of virtual channels is a breakthrough, but the technology is still in the early stages of development.

But I no longer doubt that incredible things can be done with that unused 90 percent of my implant's hardware capacity. Tests conducted a month after my visit to Advanced Bionics show that my ability to discriminate among notes has improved considerably. With Hi-Res, I was able to identify notes only when they were at least 70 hertz apart. Now, I can hear notes that are only 30 hertz apart. It's like going from being able to tell the difference between red and blue to being able to distinguish between aquamarine and cobalt.

My hearing is no longer limited by the physical circumstances of my body. While my friends' ears will inevitably decline with age, mine will only get better.

Michael Chorost (michael@chorost.com) is the author of Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human.

Reprogramming the Inner Ear http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/ear_pr.html

Cochlear implants, introduced 20 years ago, have given 83,000 deaf people the ability to hear human speech. Surgeons drill a hole in the skull, embed a sound receiver, and weave an electrode array into the cochlea. Once the hardware is in place, software engineers take over, upgrading the devices as needed so users can enjoy more complex sounds, like music.

1. The earpiece contains a microphone to receive sound and a processor to convert it to digital information.

2. The information travels up to a headpiece that uses a radio transmitter to relay the digitized sound through the skin.

3. The sound is picked up by an implant in the user's skull. The headpiece clings magnetically to the implant through the scalp.

4. The implant converts the radio signal into electrical pulses, which travel to an array of 16 or 24 electrodes in the inner ear. The electrodes strobe on and off to stimulate the auditory nerves. In time, the user learns to interpret the signals as sound.

5. Users upgrade their hearing by downloading software to the external processor. Early implant users heard just eight channels (compared to 3,000 for normal hearing). The latest software makes 121 channels possible. Tomorrow?

[end of article]

Friday (June 29): As on Wednesday, I didn't get a whole movement of a Beethoven sonata to carry me back, for that movement, to a world of profundity. Sad. All My Children: Erica was now in the hospital for something revealed sometime on Monday through Thursday. Jack comes to visit and succumbs, once again, to her charms. A hospital worker saw them passionately kissing through the blinds and whipped out a small camera. Stay tuned, though the whole thing may have blown over by next Friday. Ryan keeps trying to break away from his ex-wife. Zach, who lent Adam money to pay for his son's ransom has not declared himself to be owner of the Adam estate. Most remarkably, three of the gorgeous women actually have jobs! It's not in the "real" world but in a cosmetics firm. I am not surprised.

Jim Lehrer: I heard one part very, very well. But, duh! It was two law professors talking about the Supreme Court decision on Affirmative Action. The court is moving in a conservative direction! One of the judges casts a swing vote! The court's decisions are incremental, not revolutionary!

Sunday (July 1)

Sarah and I were invited to a Mormon church by Sarah Jensen, with whom I work, to hear about the continuing recovery of her sister, Emily, from a terrible car accident six years ago at the age of 16 that left her in a coma for three months. It was her fantastic determination and the support of those who knew her that brought her recovery so far to finishing high school and LDS [Latter Day Saints, which is what Mormons are officially] Business School, where she earned a two-year degree, though it took her four years. Her parents and her sister spoke movingly--I heard her mother esp. well--and then Emily herself. She walks haltingly and so was her speech. She read from a text but so slowly that I could follow most of what she said. I was struck at one point about her expressing joy in her having recovered so far that she is now able to "serve others." All my ex-Ayn Randroid juices surged through my brain. Altruism!! (Properly viewed, Objectivist ethics is not a counsel to being self-centered but a demanding doctrine of self-improvement.) And I wanted to bring in Hayekian arguments that, since everyone knows his own local situation and desires better than anyone else, rather than having everyone serve everyone else and guess at what the others want, I would be more effective for everyone just to serve himself. I wonder why there are constant exhortations to serve others. It must not be natural. No one has to be told to drink when thirsty. Why do some societies and religions drum these ideas of serving others in more than others? How altruistic are we by our biological nature? (I do subscribe to group as well as individual selection but have no measures.) Does the Mormon community benefit from this indoctrination? (I presume that those cheerful folks that constantly help others out of sheer exuberance just do it and don't *talk* about the importance of "serving others." I have been regarded as both extremely self-centered and a uncommonly generous. What is my writing if not a gift to you, my readers? It is an urge to *self*-expression, you reply, and therefore selfish.  If so, then everyone is "selfish" in a uselessly tautological sense. In the sense of self-improvement, well I'm constantly striving to learn more, though I do plead guilty to wasting many hours reading Richard Dawkins' _The God Delusion_, which was entertaining and even morale boosting to this atheist but from which I learned almost nothing. But Emily clearly has it all over me in the self-improvement department! I think her "serving others" (if she said it, I missed it) will be consisting of inspiring others in disastrous situations to improve themselves, which means to be selfish!

Mormonism is a high-commitment religion. Not only is there tithing (giving up 10% of one's income to the church), but Sunday observances last three hours. Mark Twain, in _Letters from the Earth_ had the Devil observe that humans could not stand more than an hour and a quarter in church! Mormons also require missionary work of two years for men, and it is strongly encouraged in women. There are extra benefits: if one is married to another Mormon in a Temple ceremony, one gets to go to a higher place in Heaven and will be wed for eternity in the afterlife. There is no divorce, so you'd better make an excellent choice! On the other hand, it seems that far more people get to at least the lower ranks of Heaven than other Christians promise. God only knows, of course, whether Sarah and I will get into Heaven, and an atheist like me says, of course, God doesn't know, because God doesn't exist.

I have long said, long before I met Sarah Jensen, that were I to regain my Christian faith, I would do so as a Mormon. It is quite attractive that revelation, apart from what results from individual prayer, should continue into the present and to Americans (the land I love) as well. What is even better, and this I learned only a year ago, is that god was once a man and became a god by the process of glorification. That you, too, might become a god is a part of Mormon theology. Were this to happen to me, I'd start up a new universe and make improvements on the current one, not unlike the constitution of the Confederate States of America improved upon the (illegal) constitution of 1787, In other words, our world is the botched thing it is because the man who became the current god was far from perfect, and this imperfection continued when he became a god. Mormon theologians should have no difficulty construing Biblical passages about god's omnipotence and omniscience as metaphorical. The imperfections of god are patent, in that, rather than offer more feasible covenants (Adam and Eve broke the first one within a matter of eight to twenty-four hours, according to rabbis who have wrestled with the matter, as Genesis itself doesn't make the matter of timing clear.) The current god is a liberal, in other words, one who vastly overestimates the capacity of human nature. He is also a bureaucrat. Here's what I wrote in another context:

The ferocity of the left's transcendental egalitarianism pales, however, beside transcendental religious objections about violations of the sanctity of embryonic life. There is nothing in the Bible against abortion or suicide, an extraordinary omission on the part of the Lord, who issued 613 commandments (mitzvot) in the Old Testament alone, such as : "And the meat-offering thereof [of the Omer on the morrow after the first day of Passover] shall be two tenth deals of fine flour mingled with oil, an offering made by fire unto the Lord for a sweet savour: and the drink-offering thereof shall be of wine, the fourth part of an hin" (Leviticus 23:13). Or this: "But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks [for a man child it's only one week], as in her separation: and she shall continue in the blood of her purification threescore and six days" (Leviticus 12:5). Yet again, "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord they God" (Deuteronomy 22:5). Out with women's pants-suits! And of polyester suits for both sexes: "Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woolen and linen together" (Deut. 22:11). And even "Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together" (previous verse). And again, "Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with divers seed: lest the fruit of thy seed which though hast sown, and the fruit of thy vineyard be defiled" (verse before that). But more reasonably, "Thou shalt not have in thy bag diverse weights, a great and a small" (Deut. 25:15).

It is lovely that Emily's entire religious community would rally behind her. (I am not, of course, persuaded that their prayers were efficacious. But Sarah long ago told me that, though prayer doesn't change things, it changes people and people change things.) Would I wish to join such a community? The tiny business of evidence is my fundamental objection, but I think I would find the magnitude of the commitment too high and would have left the Church of LDS. There are plenty who have and who have written indignant books. When I was looking for background books on Mormonism, I saw several of them and pushed them all aside. I would have learned nothing from them. In any case, this commitment to Emily, who I doubt will become fully self-supporting, is not something your author instant who in practice looks upon such matters as a utilitarian, however much he may argue in other places about the weakness of utilitarianism as the ground of ethics. At least until now. A Premise Checked!

After the talks, we spoke with Sarah's new boyfriend, a fine fellow who seems eminently suitable to become Sarah's wife and is attending law school at Yale. Also there was a fellow working for the Brookings Institution, who had graduated from the University of Chicago Law School. He was rather unfamiliar with the Virginia (Public Choice)and Austrian (Mises, Schumpeter, and Hayek) Schools, but he understood economics well enough to realize instantly that the energy crisis is a non-problem. We also talked with Sarah and her parents and also with Emily herself. She speaks slowly but eagerly. I told her about Anne Calahan, who suffered a car accident herself and whose survival was thought to be dim. But she also had a huge determination to make herself whole. She even took up running. Emily said she would like to run, too! As it was, she bounded eagerly in the reception room to join up with others. I had asked Sarah and her parents when Emily's sense of humor had come back. It never left her, I was told, though that could not be strictly true when she was in a coma for some months. It was certainly in place when I spoke with her.

It was a great honor for Sarah Jensen to invite us, for we were the only Gentiles (non-Mormons) there.

All in all, I heard pretty well, esp. when Sarah's mother spoke to the audience, though I must admit that my attention lagged out of fatigue toward the end. I didn't do as well during the reception, which could get noisy, but that has always been true.

Tuesday (July 3): Sarah (Forman, now) and I went to see a dermatologist in Chevy Chase. I suggested we go to the eighteenth floor of the building to get a great view of the area. That floor had a gym and we saw the steeple of the church we were in on Sunday. Nothing to report about my hearing, just a nice coincidence.

Thursday (July 5): Sarah joined me at the Folklife Festival, where we caught up with her third cousin, Mary Thorpe, who was volunteering at the Virginia section celebrating the landing in Jamestown 400 years ago. The Kent region of England was represented there, as Kent supplied a vastly disproportionate number of immigrants to Jamestown. Sarah spoke at length with the daughter of a viscount and who lived in a magnificent estate, casually and as equals. (Sarah can do this.) They shared the conversations equally, as Sarah had, as always, pertinent information to impart. I can't say I followed it very well.

Friday (July 6): All My Children: Adam is losing his fortune, including his mansion, to Zach. Recall that his son, J.R., faked a kidnaping and that Zach put up money for the ransom. This money never came back, forcing Adam to sell off his fortune. This may very well be a way of getting the again Adam (now 70 in actual life) off the show. When he goes, the show will lose its anchor and may well come to an end. Quite a number of vultures showed up trying to grab the mansion. Jack is now talking with the self-centered Greenlee, who did not want to break with Ryan (Wikipedia corrects me, as I thought they had been divorced). Erica, whom Jack wants to divorce, warns him about Greenlee. Ryan tried to comfort, Anne, whom he married for the second time on May 22. His wholesome honesty makes me think is the most Mormon-like character in the show.

Jim Lehrer: My hearing wasn't so good. There was blather about a groups of rock "musicians" staging big fund raisers to combat global warming. This would, of course, make me want the globe to heat up enough to boil these musicians. No thoughts expressed that the earth my be too cool. No one ever says what the optimal temperature of the globe might be. Big Chill is getting ready to become a huge rent-seeking lobby, irregardless of any concern about facts and costs.

Sunday (July 8): A hearing recap. I can only get a few minutes of clear music when I go running, as I reported, though sometimes I hook into the music later on and past the tunes that go through my head. I discovered that my meat ear now distorts the scale! This was very clear when I followed the score of the Mozart Sonata in C at home. This distortion isn't always there, though. I can get a certain enjoyment anyway, since I know what the melodic line of music that I know very well is supposed to sound like. But the parodying of the actual line, which can be entertaining, does not comport to my getting into synch with the great masterpieces. It remains to be seen (HEARD!) how will my meditations will give me brain control. I also listened to my eight Dr. Seuss books for the first time since June 7. They sounded quite a bit different, reflecting either the new settings Andrea made for me or else my own brain evolution. The sound was not as crisp as before and the tunes intruded more whenever there was any music joining the readings. (At first, the music came in as just high decibel racket.) But I could hear the higher-pitched consonants better. Andrea had made my second program do this, but I don't know about what she had done to all the programs, in particular the third one, which is for an external input (in this case, my stereo) only. It *might* seem that the changes made things for the worse, but it could also mean that I just need to relearn a bit with the new settings. Sarah and Greg continue to run through words with me. Alas, I've been quite busy on a major project and haven't been devoting as much time as I should to improving my hearing. This will change as soon as my office delivers the Sound and Beyond software. It finally got ordered, but the computer people at work need to test it for the compatibility with the whole network. I have no reason to think there will be a problem, but that's their job. I hope it doesn't take a long time!

--------------------

Friday 2007 June 15

Wednesday (June 6): We attended the funeral of Ron Miller, a former colleague at the Civil Aeronautics Board. I was never esp. close to Ron, but he saved my life. I was an alcoholic and, in 1975, he got me to take up running, which I did on Washington's Birthday that year. I'll never forget how much effort it was to run just over a mile! Running changed my brain, so much that I couldn't even drink a couple of beers without getting a hangover. I stopped completely for over a year at the end of 1975. After that I would have a couple of beers, but no more. I last had even a single drink in 1983. Today, I do not even want the effects of liquor. Every now and then maybe I do but very, very rarely. It was in the Fall of 1976 that I suddenly discovered that the first Marine Corps Marathon was being held early the next morning. I finished it! Next year, I qualified for the Boston Marathon. I've already spoken about that, but here's to say that, had I continued my downward spiral into drink, I'd likely have killed myself. My eternal gratitude, Ron! It was one of those nice coincidences that sometimes makes me think the world conspires to make me happy that we ran into his wife, Judy, at the YMCA. I planned to visit Ron and thank him, but his cancer proceeded too rapidly. But his wife told him and her children.

At the funeral were several colleagues from the CAB I hadn't seen since it folded at the end of 1984. I could hardly make out a word of the tributes from the pulpit in the church, but I spoke to them individually afterwards with better success. No need to go into details here, for this is a diary about my hearing. Ron was an avid canoer, and his CAB friends that came were remarkably fit. I had expected many to have aged or gained so much weight that I wouldn't have recognized them. Not so! One of them was John, whose last name escapes me. He was blond but part of his eyebrow was (and is) bright white. He used to wear a delightful straw hat. I bring up John, since it was he who defended an exhibit in a big international case I worked up. It involved calculating the profits U.S. carriers made in "beyond markets." These are markets into other countries beyond the market from the United States. If a U.S. carrier flies from New York City to Buenos Aires and then onward, the onward portion is called the "beyond market." I don't at all remember what my calculations were supposed to justify (probably that these profits were modest), but only skeletal statistics were presented at the hearing. My job was to make a whole bunch of assumptions and calculate the profits in the "beyond markets." My calculations were quite elaborate, though not involving any higher mathematics than algebra.

The United States lost the case. We at the CAB held a consolation party. Frank Lewis, the chief accountant there, introduced me laughingly as the guy who did Exhibit 38B (or whatever it was), the exhibit that blew up the case. Now here's the rub. John is a more pleasant fellow than I was, but since he didn't do the calculations (and I don't think he has the math savvy to do them), he fell down on the witness stand. In some earlier cases, I defended my own exhibits. My job on these cases was to assign a dollar value to the odium of having to change carriers on a route. This was much more complex, and I even dragged in calculus. I went through one of the chief books that made the case for airline deregulation, George W. Douglas and James Clifford Miller III, _Economic Regulation of Domestic Air Transport: Theory and Policy_ (1974). (Yes, this is the same Jim Miller who followed David Stockman as Director of the Budget under Reagan.) Jim's dissertation at UVa (he was in the same class in graduate economics I was) was in airline scheduling, and I think Douglas's dissertation covered the same topic. The book involved applied econometrics beyond what I knew. Still, I distilled a useful equation out of it, which says that the chance of finding an empty seat rises asymptotically as the average percent of seats filled goes over 60% or so, something everyone has noticed since airline deregulation. I applied their big equation, reduced to a simple one, in my work. Well, airline lawyers (quite well paid!) grilled me for three hours on the witness stand. I fielded their questions by stressing the general plausibility of my calculations and invited them to submit their own, which they had not done before the hearing. The C.A.B. won the case. (The whole thing was phony, since carriers need not operate the schedules the suggested in the hearing and upon which I made my calculations, but never mind.) A second time on a similar case, my reputation for defending my work had gotten around, and I was grilled for only an hour. The third time, the airline attorneys said, "We have no questions of this witness." I am reminded of my first boss at the CAB, the legendary Sam Brown, telling me that he was in a hearing once and an airline lawyer asked him, "Dr. Brown, what is a logarithm." Sam rattled out the standard definition, "A logarithm of a number is that exponent to which a fixed number, called the base, must be raised to produce the given number." The lawyer said, "I withdraw the question"!

Connection to my hearing: Sam ran the Economics Research Section, later the Office of Plans, and gave me my only promotion in the government, from a GS-11 to a GS-12 in 1972. The Office of Plan was abolished by the then chairman of the CAB, a wheat farmer in Washington state who was chairman of the Republican National Committee for that state as a reward for his good work in getting Nixon re=elected. He simply didn't understand our work and got rid of it. Since I had produced a nice compilation summarizing international air cargo statistics, I was assigned to the Bureau of International Affairs. I was happy for exactly one morning, since I had a boss who didn't think straight. More important, the international stuff was even more politicized than the domestic stuff, in which I just did research anyhow. As I've said several times already, policy is not written down or even spoken, so much as *overheard*, which couldn't do back then, even though my hearing wasn't nearly as bad as it was to become. So John of the straw hat, a bit cocky (around me, at any rate) but a congenial guy, defended my exhibit. I hold nothing against him at all, but rather his boss, Herb Aswall, who decided to have John defend the exhibit. Herb was arrogant and thought he knew the Nixon policy line, which was to give the airlines what they wanted. (Republicans are champions of big business, not free enterprise.) Now the work I and others did for Sam suggested that there really was no conflict between airline profits and public benefit. The public likes low prices but airline profits (when the airlines are shielded from competition by the government) do not always do up when prices do, contrary to what one might think on first blush. The profits in fact depend on what is called "the elasticity of demand." What happened was airline lawyers came to dominate airline economists and played regulatory games with the government. The studies from Sam's shop and from academia all suggested lower prices, but the airlines managed to come up with studies that suggested what common sense says, namely higher prices always mean higher profits. At this stage of the conflict, who wins the cases at the CAB depends on White House philosophy. Well, Herb went along with the then Nixon line and told me, &quo