I had heard all the stories about cochlear implants making voices sound robotic. Mine didn’t. Everyone just sounded like a man. A decrepit old man talking to me under water.
Men sounded like deeper sounding men. Women sounded like men. Even my teen daughter, Marina, sounded 80 years old. It didn’t matter how high or naturally feminine someone’s voice was. Everything my cochlear implant delivered to my brain came through low, deep and muffled. Even my own voice. So much so that I am starting to question if my voice has changed.
Audiobooks are particularly strange. The narrator sounds slightly clearer at first, but the longer I listen, the deeper the voice seems to become. I keep on going until I’m too exhausted to keep listening to such a weird voice.
I know Joe’s voice, my children’s voices and my own. But knowing what someone should sound like and actually hearing them that way are two very different things. My cochlear implant gives my brain access to sound, but my brain has not yet learned how to organize that sound into natural pitch, tone and timbre. It can recognize that someone is speaking. It just isn’t particularly interested in preserving anyone’s actual identity.
Speech is still difficult to understand with the implant alone. When I add my right hearing aid, voices become clearer because my brain can combine the familiar acoustic sound from the hearing aid with the new electrical information from the implant. The two devices do not sound alike, but together they give me more information than either one does alone.
So I keep listening. To Joe, my children and audiobooks while reading along. I give my brain the voices it already knows and wait for it to connect the new signal with the people speaking.
I know voices will not sound this way forever. Activation was only the beginning, and my brain is still learning an entirely new way to hear. But during those first few days, I did occasionally wonder if Mickey Mouse in a tin can may have been a slight improvement.
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