Helping the Deaf Hear Music

John Redden is a deaf professional musician. He can sing on key, harmonize on key, and hear musical intervals well enough to reproduce them. He does this with a cochlear implant, which is a computer chip surgically embedded in his skull. The chip drives 16 tiny electrodes threaded into his inner ear that stimulate his auditory nerves. It gets auditory data from an external computer sitting on his ear that looks like a hearing aid. Instead of amplifying sound, though, it digitizes it and sends it to the implant by radio through the skin.