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Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Query to New Scientist's Last Word section

Profoundly deaf since birth, I have always wondered what it was like to hear. 26 years later, I finally see the glimmer of hope, before I die, that I will finally understand WHY music is all hyped.

Now, my question is, since I have a whole auditory cortex that I have yet to utilize, how would you best suggest I approach my "training," since I have maybe 10 years before a cure for deafness is perfected. Could vivid sign language descriptions of sound (such as visual descriptions for the blind) composed with tactile vibrations and other sensory feedback evoke synaesthesia of hearing sound for me?

I sent this question to New Scientist's Last Word section. Instead of pathologically trying to cure us, I think hearing people should TRY to make us understand the sensation of hearing.The word synaesthesia means, according to dictionary.com,

A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.

3 Comments:

Elizabeth said...: Hi Jason.
My Name's Elizabeth; I'd like to tell you a little about myself, and then I'd like to ask you for a favor. I'm not deaf. I have a cousin who used to be until she had a cochlear implant put in her head. I live in Michigan, she lives in South Carolina. That's the extent of my connection to any deaf community, so pardon if my ettiquette isn't quite right. Maybe because we used to play together on family vacations..maybe because we were both different (I'm a Korean who was adopted into a caucasian family)..she's always been my favorite cousin, and I've always been interested in what it's like to be deaf. That being said, my passion has always been music. I love music, and my dream is to teach music to the deaf. Can you believe it? I just kind of wandered onto your blog! Unfortunately, it's an unattainable dream as I'm still working my way back to college. Even then, I'm not really sure what exactly to persue when I get to college. What I'd like from you is perhaps your friendship - someone who I can refer to and ask, "Is this really going to work?" - at the very least, the rest of your thoughts on the subject. I hope you don't find this terribly rude or presumptuous. It's just an unusual request from an uneducated girl who doesn't know where to start. You can reach me at elisa760@hotmail.com Thanks for your time.; 10/30/2005 12:22:45 PM
jeff said...: How about cued speech? It's a visual representation of phonemic sounds. Naturally, it requires you know cued English and once you know how cued English is processed, you can assign visual cues to auditory phonetic sounds.

As for music, music is VERY complex and there's no system that can visually represent music accurately. Our eyes don't scan the visual differences in pitches very well as our ears do.; 10/31/2005 01:33:52 PM
Jason said...: all dreams are attainable, as long as you THINK it is! :)

hmm, cued speech.. I really don't know that much about it to make a comment. All i know is that it has done some real good for some deaf people I know. I guess it's an effective method, if ASL is also presented. That would be similar to my SEE/ASL upbringing. Basically, I really want to understand music. I am not really worrying about spoken speech, i believe that technology will eventually take care of that for me.

That's what I want to help create: an alternative representation of music. I am pretty sure that there are ways to "unlock" the brain's ability to comphrend pitch via specific vibrations felt in different areas of the body. That is how a deaf woman pinaist came to tactially "hear" the different range of sounds of the piano.; 11/03/2005 10:58:43 PM