'Where it is somewhat lacking is more in relating information about pitch and timbre,' says Phillips-Silver. 'All of our senses give us the ability to experience very different worlds,' Swiller says.Ī cochlear implant is designed to do one thing really well - allow users to understand speech.

And he started listening to music again, which is when he realized that his tastes had changed.

Over the next few months, Swiller's brain learned to decode words and sentences. 'Your brain is understanding, 'OK, this is a language, but I need to figure out how to interpret this language,' ' he says. And he couldn't figure out what people were saying. The voices seemed artificial, high pitched and harsh. 'I remember sitting in a room and thinking everyone was a digital version of themselves,' he says. Swiller says when a doctor switched on his device for the first time, he wasn't prepared for the way people would sound. Once Swiller healed from the surgery, the receiver was connected to the external parts of the device: a microphone and processor that resemble a traditional hearing aid.

That meant surgery to place a receiver under the skin behind his ear and electrodes in the cochlea, a hollow tube in the inner ear containing nerve endings that carry sound information to the brain. Health Cochlear Implants Redefine What It Means To Be Deaf 'Not just the sound of music, but the whole theory of music, the energy that's created, the connection between a band and the audience and just the whole idea of just rocking out.' Swiller didn't know what most of the lyrics were saying until MTV started closed captioning its music videos. 'Isolation was a common theme in my childhood and so Nirvana kind of spoke to me,' he says. He relied on lip reading and creativity to get by.Īnd he took refuge in music, especially grunge rock that cranked up the low-frequency sounds he heard best. He recalls 'feeling isolated and separated from everyone, even though it was a picnic filled with family friends.'Įven with hearing aids, Swiller was only understanding perhaps one word in three. 'The earliest memory I have of that awareness is a family picnic around the time I was 4 or 5,' he says.

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