I posted this comment on slashdot, I thought I'd copy it here, just as documentation for all the weird ideas I've had over the years. By the way, it's years since I visited the Technical Museum, my comment may make it look like I just visited. In case someone wondered.
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I though of an idea for a hearing aid the other day, and I wonder if something like this exists.
I was in the technical museum in Oslo when I came across an exhibit which was simply a table with a small vibrating metal dot in the middle, plus a plastic bowl beside it. As my hands touched that dot, I had an odd feeling of recognition. I found out why when I put the bowl on the dot (that was the intent of the exhibit). The bowl functioned as a loudspeaker, and I heard radio, a weather broadcast as I recall.
That set me thinking. When I just felt the vibrations, it was almost as if I could hear words. Fingertips are really sensitive, I wonder if it's possible to learn to "hear" that way with practice. Perhaps if the device is tuned to amplify the frequencies associated with speech, and to map it in such a way as to make best use of fingertip sensitivity.
And think of GSM compression. It builds a pretty sophisticated model of the resonance chambers in your head and throat. Surely there must be a way of representing that voice data as shapes and colours in such a way that deaf people could learn to understand it. After all, we have impressive knowledge about the sounds of human speech and how they are made. We have built computer programs to pick up the sounds of human speech and transcribe it into something like phonetic writing. Speech-to-text systems then make guesses about which words the sounds represents, but we can skip that last step, because deaf people's brains can certainly learn to make better guesses, even if they have been deaf from birth. We just need a real-time, visual way of efficiently transmitting the phonetic data.
Someone must have thought of it before.
Posted by vintermann at April 6, 2006 10:53 AM