Right off the bat after skimming this I'm caught up with a detail that you confirm multiple times - that you can tell literally nothing apart given any input over 70 hz. You have had this measured a few times and you definitely say that nothing is coming across above 70 hz.
Yet you are trying to hear all sorts of things that have most all of their information content above 70hz.
The Hatsune Miku music? You're hearing the bass and the kick drums and maybe some subharmonics generated in the reverberation of the higher stuff. But that is a tiny fraction of the music, and, I hate to tell you this, but that computer girl singing is all way, waaay up higher than 70hz. The beautiful sounds you are getting across are the cool synth basses of all that music. It's very modern, punchy music and the bass of that type of electronic music is very different from other classical music so whatever modulation your implants are doing to it from 70 hz down likely sounds very cool compared to a lot of other music, for sure.
But, stop- you're getting nothing by noise and wind sounds with no information differentiation over 70hz because your brain isn't demodulating that information, maybe due to something about how the implant was... implanted... or just your specific condition, who knows, but what you can do is work in the band you have.
You mention not getting human voices because the fundamentals of human voices are more than 2x where your cutoff is.
Have you tried using a program like Audacity - or - Get claude to write a script for you that takes in MP3's of modern music and slows them down 300-400 %. The music will be very slow, but it will shift instruments from higher up (pianos, horns, people's signing) down into the 20-70 hz range, and you will maybe hear patterns that are new. Did no one in the study post-op sit with you and go thru this kind of thing? You have all these external trials listed but most all of it is moot if everything above 70hz is missing and you aren't able to modify the modulator hardware.
Note that the type of rhythms in the bass of the bass synthesizers of that Hatsune Miku tracks are different that the more complex rhythms and melodies played by instruments higher up (like pianos and lead synths). (This is true for most all music genres...) Shifting those higher up things down in frequency, even if that means they play back slower, may give you an different musical experience.
Continuously pegging your implant modulation hardware with frequency content above 70hz attempting to discover something about how it interacts with your brain when you continuously get nothing but broadband noise over 70hz seems like a dead end exercise.
I mean hell, have you tried putting a low pass filter to block out on everything in the music/microphone input above 70hz just to make sure that information isn't somehow overloading the way the implant works with your brain, and maybe just causing confusion.
Lastly it sounds like you could benefit from talking with someone with a real audio / digital signals processing / electrical engineering background that can inspect your hardware directly and make suggestions because educating yourself with just GPT runs might be spinning you in circles.
For instance... you mention things like " The logic of my test apps, which generate the test sounds and move the staircases, was checked with the Lean 4 formal verifier,"
Man... this has nothing to do with needing a 'Lean 4 formal verifier' to check your app or whatever. You need someone to sit with you and your damn hardware and work with some audio input. You need the someone that setup the original implant modular to explain the hardware mapping and filtering options to you and see if you can go back and change how that works, to get more options. You're getting some wildly mixed signals (bad pun) about how all this works, I think.
[–] bscphil 2 days ago
[–] mk_stjames 2 days ago
Any computer sound card will high-pass anything over about 16-18 hz and thus new lower stuff won't swamp, and it seems like his implant amplifier does indeed deal with low frequencies because he mentions using an 18hz tone to keep the device key'ed on.
Another thing then to mention would be 'binning' audio that has been pitch shifted own using notch filters / comb filters. Because it is possible that however the implant is wired could use some band gaps to help his brain 'decode' things more clearly and less muddy.
Again, all this is simple shit and I find it really surprising that there isn't someone to help run these tests on hardware with this person, and their blog post here has this very strange rabbit hole feel to it and I can't tell if it is because there is a lot lost in translation, or if there is a lot more to this that is coming across in translation... or if this person in being led down some near-AI-psycosis and is struggling because they simply don't have someone to sit with that can help.
It all comes off to me as very, very strange.
[–] dugidugout 2 days ago
I agree with the broader instinct that OP deserves a clinician to help with the hardware side (having their map and device parameters alone would go a long way), but it seems OP is taking any step they can towards this effort.
I regret that I don't have anything to actually add towards helping OP. Their posture towards understanding is refreshing and the Lean bit reads to me more as a cute testament to that than anything eerie or strange.
[–] mk_stjames 2 days ago
If I'm a bit more imaginative on this 2nd read of their 'experience' of these tests it seems that maybe yes, they hear 'something' at higher frequencies but it just just broadband noise- broadband noise mind you, is, all frequencies... so I was confused at how someone could say they 'don't hear anything above 70hz' and yet can somehow hear 'noise' at '2000 hz'. But it is dawning on me that the implant / associated driver hardware may simply be 'saturating' when the spectral content of audio is too large at all those frequencies, and OP can actually 'hear' something, but it just blurs into white noise when the spectral power is too high - kinda like there is a massive amount of reverb being applied to everything over 70hz.
But again they talk about their struggles with understanding voices and whatnot but if they are hearing parts of music at all then they could be hearing people' voices shifted into bands and toned down to amplitudes that helps them. Like, clinicians with experience here should be helping with this and it is kinda insane that this person is attempting to discern anything themselves.
The exposition is strange and again that could just be the translation and writing style but some of those little bits and just the way I've seen some people literally start spiraling when they start to pair-autodiadict with AI - coupled with the fact this is a medical condition and a life-altering disability - along with a few other small oddities in this post - make me kinda worried there is a lot more to this than posted and OP may need other kinds of help with their situation.
[–] dugidugout 2 days ago
In a CI, voice pitch actually _does_ arrive as amplitude modulation at the F0 rate. The processor keeps only each channel's envelope, and the harmonics of a voice that share a channel beat against each other at F0. So a 70 Hz flutter ceiling and vocal ranges do belong in the same breath.
> ... so I was confused at how someone could say they 'don't hear anything above 70hz' and yet can somehow hear 'noise' at '2000 hz'. But it is dawning on me that the implant / associated driver hardware may simply be 'saturating' ...
The TMTF carrier was noise by design, so above 70 Hz the flutter vanished and the noise that was already there is all that's left. No saturation is needed to explain it. The “wind” in SRD is what a spectral ripple sounds like through limited spectral resolution. This is a resolution problem, not a level problem.
> The exposition is strange and again that could just be the translation and writing style...
This paragraph was why I initially made a comment. They were radically honest with their methodology and obviously living inside the problem. OP is actually reading this thread, for what it's worth.
[–] jdanford 2 days ago
[–] dugidugout 1 day ago
[–] mi-rae 2 days ago
[–] Bedon292 2 days ago
I would think you could take the audio processor out of the loop and run diagnostics on the implant itself using an EEG to determine how the brain is responding. They test the hearing of newborns with the tech, you don't need to "trust" a person or even need them to be able to communicate. Its right there in the data.
Based on my read of everything it feels like there is some issue with the implant sending electrical signals, but the nerve not actually picking them up and sending them on. Perhaps related to the original reason for the hearing loss. And the company should want to dig info it more. I know I would if it were my tech.
[–] mi-rae 2 days ago
[–] mi-rae 2 days ago
[–] mk_stjames 2 days ago
I see your situation more clearly after re-reading and also seeing your new responses here in these threads.
I think if you write more on this topic, especially more about your history of hearing and what you can in fact perceive, and publish more on the internet, you will find people who are very interested in this kind of topic - it is something that will 'nerd snipe' many tech minded people - and I am sure you could absolutely make friends in Korea who are interested to help. Having someone with an audiology background, or even a student in neurology who knows their way around audio signals processing / has a DSP / EE background etc. sit in with you for some experiments as you use the line input for you device - someone who also hears what the input is, and can talk with you about it - would be invaluable and could also be a fun social connection- maybe university students, etc. If I spoke Korean and lived in your city I would definitely find it fascinating to try and help out.
[–] mi-rae 2 days ago
[–] ink_13 2 days ago
Wikipedia is not bad on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range
[–] bscphil 2 days ago
That's pretty misleading, we tend to have excellent hearing anywhere in the 100 hz - 6000 hz range. Much of music and all fundamental frequencies produced by the human voice (except people with very rare whistle register abilities) is below 2000 hz. We're most sensitive to the range you're talking about because it's the most useful for discriminating between different sounds, but still only slightly more sensitive to that range than to lower frequencies.
[–] rini17 2 days ago
[–] Bedon292 2 days ago
I also think there are some relatively cheap options for getting or building a simple EEG. At least in the US, I don't know about Korea. Which could allow for some more interesting tests. Let it play various sounds and tones while recording with no visual stimulus to go with it, and see how they correspond to the EEG data.
You don't need to slow them down, you can just pitch shift everything into the 0-70 hz range. If there were a way to figure out how his brain is demodulating the signal, you might even get something pretty reasonable out - the essay describes sounds like cars as hissy rather than heavy.
The real difficulty is keeping genuinely inaudible frequencies (<40 hz? but who knows how his implant works) from swamping the rest, I would think.