[tt] Frank Forman, Cochlear Cyborg, update of 2007.11.11
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Frank Forman, Cochlear Cyborg, update of 2007.11.11
Monday (October 15): Last night I heard the great Passacaglia and Fugue
so poorly that I did not pick up the tune I knew so well! Ditto this
morning with the Moonschein sonata. If I had had the scores in front of
me, I'm sure I would have synchronized.
Sound and Beyond: Recall that I'm now making two tests as difficult as
possible. There being no levels, I've stopped asking for a reply and
now I'm not even looking at the choices beforehand. Naturally, my
scores went down. The idea is to build them back up and up and up, to
the point where I'm not gaining any more training. I've already made
the six word discrimination tests as hard as I can. Today, it's the two
music appreciation tests.
Instruments: blind 13 out of 18, seeing, same, but it was 15 when
I could look at the choices.
Familiar melodies: blind 9 out of 16, seeing, 14, , but it was 15 when
I could look at the choices. I didn't make a blind guess at all, as I
am quite tired.
No scratch this first result. I am just tired now and am not even
recording things properly. The results of what I pressed stay on the
computer and:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
[Who said that?]
On the way home, I picked up the attenuating cord at RadioSnack. It
works in cutting down the noise, but its attenuation of 90 db is too
much. The result is, that to get a decent volume in my cyberear, the
music blasts into my meat ear. I can correct this by doing what I did
when still wearing hearing aids, namely put a resistor, value to be
determined by experiment, in the wire going to my meat ear. Or, I can
hope that all I have to do is reduce the length of the cable I bought
at RadioSnack. Just clip out the part of it and solder it back
together. [Later: I made some time ago a patch cord with a resistor
for my left ear, to make the left and right channels come out okay on
my stereo. It's funny that one I made for my WalkWoman (220 ohms)
works okay there, but when I use my stereo, I had generally had to
turn the balance control almost completely to the right. I forget how
many ohms were on this second resistor, but it was considerably higher
than the one for my WalkWoman. The value for these resistors was
determined by trial and error. I asked Dave Tanner, my physics friend
at the University of Florida, what the formula would be, given my
comparative hearing loss on each ear. He said the formula would be too
complicated and that I should resort to trial and error. I turns out
that this patch cord works pretty well for my purposes. But, problems
remain. The RadioSnack cord worked for a while on my stereo and then
stopped. It comes and goes and its effectiveness varies when I use
this cord alone or in conjunction with the splitter cord that feeds
into a body aid receiver in my meat ear and a miniplug to go into my
sound processor. Also, my stereo itself seems to be causing problems.
I'm just going to buy a new one. I looked far and wide to find one
which allowed one to adjust the channel balance from the remote
control, since I would often lie down and take one of my three or four
daily naps and not have to get up to adjust the balance, which would
prevent my falling into a light sleep, which my narcolepsy requires
that I do. But now, the sound processor can be controlled lying down
and it's just the overall volume that I'll need to adjust. I am not, I
repeat I am not, a lazy couch potato that never exercises!)
So for a while, it will be only my cyber ear. I tried the Passacaglia
and Fugue again. Poor results.
Sarah asked me to pick up some vitamin B1 on the way home. I thought
I'd just get some at Whole Foods, where I get my yogurt, but it wanted
$5.50 for a hundred 100 mg. "organic" tablets. Fergit it, I said. So I
got walking down to Rodman's. The store I bought my Glenn Gould iSong
years ago was still open. So I went in and asked about other CDs to
train with. It had none, but I spotted a four-octave roll-up keyboard
that I can listen to without it producing irritating sounds, just
going to my processor. This is exactly what I need! It does a bunch of
things, which just about everything electronic does. It produces a
pure tone imitates 99 different instruments. The scale sounds bad, but
a little better as I fooled around. I may replace some of my Gould
training with this. [Later: I have to take it back. I can't completely
turn off the volume coming out of the speaker and this annoys Sarah no
end. Besides, every note dies out in about a second, irregardless of
what the score says. So, out comes an old electronic Casio keyboard,
and this works fine. I've used it thrice iirc and am distressed that
the notes subjectively are badly wrong and that I can't perceive
octaves. But remember that I couldn't tell men's from women's voices
at all.
Tuesday (October 16): Not very good with the Beethoven, cyber ear only.
At noon, I walked over to the Mall to look at the 2007 Solar Decathlon
and heard various hosts at several houses pretty well, unless they
spoke too rapidly, which many of them did. A woman came up to me about
my cochlear implant (I wear a bright orange receiver to draw attention
to it.) She had one herself and we got to talking for about fifteen
minutes. I sent her this diary, hoping for an engaging correspondence,
but I never heard from her again. This happens to me a lot, for
reasons I don't quite understand.
Later that day, I had a nice conversation with a Rambling wreck and
learned that solar panels are 17% efficient and that even when
they are angled, they are still 12% efficient. He was a practical guy
and completely understood that the energy CRISIS is an economic thing.
I decided just to go back to my older system using the telephone
adapter. I looked at the score of the Passacaglia and quickly hooked
onto the main melody. It's all out of scale but I loved listening to
it, though I didn't make out any of the countermelodies. I await a
concentrated listening while following the score.
I have decided that I love myself and my life! My wife, my wife, too,
my wife most especially. This is nothing new. But I realize more than
ever that she is my partner, my partner on the journey that is my
life. I can be distressed with who I am and that I'm just a bureaucrat
who got only one promotion back in 1972. Partly this is because I
can't pick up all the little signals and gossip, where the real stuff
is communicated but also because I am not shy in questioning everybody
and everything, while most folks just want to go along to get along,
an attitude written in our genes. Search for the word primate to see
my explanation for this. I have a certain compulsiveness here, since I
just can't accept that I'm not seen as helpful when I raise questions.
And I'm not nearly as disciplined when it comes to undertaking my own
projects.
I dabble too much. Still, this dabbling pays off. The Internet
exacerbates this no end, as many of us know from personal experience.
Even so, there's nothing really I am going to find out by reading more
in the philosophy of mathematics, one of my oldest loves, that will
spill over into anything else. I won't come to any conclusion of my
own, let alone persuade anyone else. It's a sheer indulgence. But for
all of the indulgence, I was able to put my other wide reading to use
and to recombine a lot of what I know when I read The Book of Mormon
and a lot more about that branch of Christianity. I don't think anyone
else would have come up with what I did. I love being me, to having
the talent to do this, to have dabbled so widely, to have an urge to
make these recombinations. And I love the paths my life has taken. Not
that I would not instantly have my hearing restored! I did take a huge
risk by having my operation, and even if I may never be able to listen
properly to music again, I love my having pursued this greatest
outpouring of the human mind to know that great music is possible and
that I personally have experienced it. It's just a bunch of notes on a
page! But music, some of it, speaks truths that cannot be expressed in
any other way.
Should my operation prove a failure as far as music goes, going
through it adds something to my being me, which I am chronicling for
others. Even the suicide of my daughter has been turned into something
added to my being. I would reverse it, absolutely, but, oddly, I am
strengthened by it, too. I can't explain this, not yet. I love my life
in that I drifted into being a bureaucrat who never took his work
seriously and hence followed his own bliss in his reading and
thinking, although basically a frustrated college professor. I think
that had I become one, I would have barely squeaked by the tenure
process and would not have become a full professor. I would publish
little, since I just don't have the discipline to play the game. My
first boss at work, Sam Brown, put in a performance appraisal that
finishing projects is just as important as staring them. He was a wise
man. Once when I grumbled about how long a project would take, he
remarked that what it demands is persistence. I have repeated that
many times. I'd have made a great professor--for a very few students.
Music is a mystery. So is love. Should I not be able to properly
listen to music again, I shall have known it. I know too many people
who have never known love at all, I am saddened by this, but it's not
an absence to them. Nothing that I have read explains the higher forms
of music or of love. There is plenty about its biology, but the
*specific* greatness of a couple of dozen composers defies analysis,
even while there is a general consensus about who they are. My own
list contains no surprises but it does contain omissions. I find no
merit in Verdi, for example, but others whose judgments I esteem do.
It is my loss.
Wednesday (October 17):
I really should move up to the second level in vowel and consonant
recognition, like I've done for male/female identification.
Word discrimination; There are 25 in each category. Again, I'm closing
my eyes and guessing before I look at the choices.
Animals: blind 8, seeing 24
Food: 9, 24
Color 7, 24
Family 13,24
Number 18,24
Time 15,24. So I missed one of each.
Thursday (October 18):
Birthday party for me and three others born in October in my office. I
didn't hear very well and so used it as a training session.
Instruments 13, 16 out of 18
Familiar Melodies 8, 13 out of 16.
My brain is having problems in calling up from memory the name of the
tune, though I jolly well know what it is.
I've finished 18 rounds. On to the 19th:
On the Pure Tone Discrimination test, the software keeps telling me to
practice at level 4 instead of level 5. My scores have run starting
from 19 out of 25, with a low of 10 (still better than chance, which
would be 25/3 = 8 1/3) and today's new high of 21. It got all the first
ten right but missed 3 of the last 15. Quite often, I do better at
first, but other times, I try extra hard and do better later.
Friday (October 19): All My Children: Adam, Greenlee, and Richie
continue to want to be a part of other people's lives. Never found out
about Ryan's accidental shooting of his wife. She seems to be just
fine. Ryan offers Richie a job so he can keep an eye on him.
Jim Lehrer Newshour: Mrs. Bhutto spoke in English, good enough for me
to mostly follow. More and more politicians have learned to speak
English. John McCain was given a softball interview by Lehrer. He came
across as empty-headed rather than as belligerent.
Saturday (October 20): Spent an hour on the iSong of Invention NO. 1,
building up from the greatest breakdown to eventually getting to Gould
himself. Did a lot of this practicing with my eyes closed. Still, I
have yet to recognize the music as familiar.
Sunday (October 21); I spent an hour with my new Portable Folding
Piano, tediously going up and down the scales in four octaves. My ears
just don't subjectively hear the scale properly. What I'm doing is
imagining that I am hearing the scales and thus training my ears.
Tuesday (October 23): Didn't notice when the Fugue in g, S. 578, the
"Little Fugue in g minor,"that Mr. Kitson chose as an example of a
fugue, when it came on.
Wednesday (October 24): First rain when out jogging since I started
using my processor as well as my meat ear. The processor not being
water-proof, I wrapped in my knapsack and listened with my meat ear
along, this time to some rondos and other shorter works of Beethoven on
my Schnabel tapes. The tunes kept interfering and the scales are
distorted. Not good today!
Art Museum: Excellent news here. I walked into a talk about my favorite
American painter, Edward Hopper, conducted by Diana Arkin. She was
enthusiastic and had such clear diction that I could generally follow
her, even though she spoke quite rapidly. My mind wandered, as it so
often does, more so when I am listening without captions than listening
with them or just reading, though I've been known to read every word in
a paragraph and not have any of the sentences register with me. I
suspect this is quite a common problem.
Sound and Beyond: Word Discrimination
Animals: blind 8, seeing 23
Food: 12, 24
Color 11, 22
Family 13, 23
Number 18, 24
Time 15, 24.
Not much change. On the other hand, I got only 56% of the Everyday
Sounds (with the highest level of background noise). Way down from 84%
last time and the time before that. This is only my fourth run at this
level. The first time was 36%.
Instruments 14, 17 out of 18
Familiar Melodies 9, 14 out of 16.
Up one blind guess and one seeing guess throughout.
I listened to the Diabelli Variations (Schnabel), strangely, since the
scale was off, but I certainly could follow the rhythm and hooked into
greatness in a real way. This may be the best piece of music I can
just follow.
Friday (October 26)
Finished the Diabellis. Sorry to say, when the variations, Op. 34,
came on my cassette tape, I didn't connect, nor, much more surprisingly
to the Eroica Variations, Op. 35.
All My Children: More of the usual stuff about people who want to hang
around but who are not wanted. At the start, Erica packs a pistol to
shoot Greenlee with. At the end, she meets her in a park. Stay tuned
for the next show. Jack doesn't like Erica's plan to get his daughter,
Greenlee, sent away to Paris to help manage their business over there.
Adam warns his son, J.R., about the manipulations of Zach. Richie, now
working for Ryan, continues to be a trouble maker.
Jim Lehrer Newshour: Boring and I must say that I found it hard to
concentrate on training my ears. A mostly wasted hour.
Wednesday (October 31): I've decided to stop listening to music for two
weeks, except for the training sessions with iSong and my keyboard. I
fear that I'm making my brain get used to hearing the notes wrongly and
then making me to expect them that way. When I'm training, I
concentrate on telling my mind to hear the note correctly. But when
listening casually, my new default errors may take over. It would be
very hard to conduct an experiment, both because finding the subjects
would be not be easy (esp. if they must be at the same stage in their
training, something itself hard to define), and because individual
variation may drain out any actual effect. If, at the end of two weeks,
I note anything dramatic, being conscious of the statistical problems,
I'll surely let everyone know.
Saturday (November 3): iSong. I carefully built up from the most
simplified version of WTC 1 prelude (left hand slow, left hand faster,
right hand slow, right hand faster, combined slow, combined faster),
then repeat for the less simplified, then to the full score, and
finally to Mr. Gould. I heard the piece not so far from my memory of it
this time, a real improvement.
Sunday (November 4):
Sarah's stepfather was in the hospital as a result of the wrong dosage
of some medicine he was taking but is now back in a special ward of
his retirement home. I am so little interested in the down side of
life that I can't remember what the medicine is or any of the details.
Sarah and I went out to their home, and she took her mother to church,
while I stayed in the library, rereading the opening foray of the
famous debate on the place of natural law in legal philosophy between
H.L.A. Hart and Lon Fuller that started in 1958. (I am a Fuller man
myself and got published a short article in Vera Lex, a small
international journal devoted to natural law. The editor told me that
my writing is rich, highly allusive, satirical, and a fourth thing,
but that I had better write it so those around the world who do not
speak English as a first language can understand my essay. As it
happens, I am now helping do research on a "strategic plan" for the 21
countries in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (the Pacific
counterpart to the European Union) regarding the learning of English.
It is being done under the auspices of the Human Resources Development
working group of APEC, of which my boss's boss is the "Lead Shepherd"!
This shows that Asians do not understand English. We English speakers
are so steeped in the Bible that the word shepherd has a special
meaning to us:
Psalm 23
Because the Lord is my Shepherd, I have everything I need!
He lets me rest in the meadow grass and leads me beside the quiet
streams. He gives me new strength. He helps me do what honors him the
most.
Even when walking through the dark valley of death I will not be
afraid, for you are close beside me, guarding, guiding all the way.
You provide delicious food for me in the presence of my enemies. You
have welcomed me as your guest; blessings overflow!
Your goodness and unfailing kindness shall be with me all of my life,
and afterwards I will live with you forever in your home.
--The Living Bible, 1967
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside
the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I
will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they
comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
--The King James Bible, 1611
I hope even my non-English readers will be shocked about this
disgraceful mauling of a sacred text. Mr. Mencken thought that
Christianity would be finished if the Bible were ever translated into
American, that the continued power of religion is owed to the majestic
language that dulls one's critical faculties. Unfortunately, he was
wrong. Religion throughout the world has been on the increase during
the last half century, a reversal of the secularization thesis.
There is a undercurrent among certain Protestants called the King
James Only movement. They insist, correctly, upon the magnificence of
the translation, "appointed to be *read* in churches," as the title
page states and some of them say are convinced that the Holy Ghost
oversaw what was, after all, a committee doing the translating, and
corrected errors in the manuscripts that they used, making the KJV an
improvement. (Joseph Smith did the same thing, and claimed divine
inspiration, but was martyred before he finished.)
Anyhow, my article for Vera Lex was at a high level, certainly in
comparison to internationally syndicated American teevee shows and
movies. Media barons don't know in advance what will sell abroad but,
in anticipation, dumb down the English so that those who study
English taught by widely different methods and will widely
different levels of rigor can follow the script. The most widely
watched teevee show of all time, with 1.1 billion viewers, was not all
that popular here. Its name? Baywatch.
So, I get assigned to assist the shepherd doing research. I am not
invited into any meetings but just try to finish research assignments,
in the first instance to find out what the "curriculum standards" are
for English in the non-English speaking countries of APEC. I couldn't
do it, except in two or three cases. They just aren't on the Web (and
I'm good at using the right combinations of words to do searches) and
my e-mails have gone unanswered. (This is not due to my personality!)
Now these curriculum standards, certainly in most U.S. states, are
wishful thinking. I've seen that for economics at the high school
level for the state of Maryland. What happens is that grave experts
sit around at a table and go over their proposals. Should students
know about the rediscount rate? Of course. Add it in. Should they know
about elasticity of demand? Add it in. At the end, there is so much
that I would fail to meet the standards, even though I do happen to
have a doctorate in the field! What's also the case is that the
standard that will come out of the process will be quite random,
especially in other countries for teaching English. I do wish I had
been able to assemble them, though what might have resulted would be
just combining *all* of them into an even more ridiculous set of
requirements.
In the process I found quite a number of potentially useful things.
One is that English to those in other countries does not mean learning
the great masterworks written in the English language. (I last had
grammar in the ninth grade. I'm a preppie, but I do think grammar gets
reduced in most of the above average high schools, at any rate, as
students move from the ninth to the twelfth grades.) Not so abroad.
Their English is practical and there are even courses called "business
English" (and in Russia one in "legal English"). I thought there might
be courses in call-center English for those who aspire to work in call
centers and handle your queries about defective products.
I also discovered that many of these countries are trying out
different methods of teaching English and running experiments. In
fact, I would have it that my shepherd's strategic plan mostly deal
with setting up an information center. Otherwise, I question the whole
business. It is hardly a secret that English is being more and more
widely used as economies interconnect. If the problem is that kids
aren't interested in learning what their parents insist that they
learn, well, this is a problem that concerns all of education. (Maybe,
just maybe, what parents want, better: what the experts want, is
for kids to learn irrelevant, no longer relevant, never was relevant
and boring.) Or is it the case that kids want to learn English but
that the school systems are too protected from competition to provide
enough courses to keep up with the demand? At least this is English
specific. Are the teachers not good enough? This is non-English
specific. In short, just what exactly is the problem that this
"strategic plan" is supposed to address. So one weekend I put together
a short but well-organized set of ideas about this plan.
It was ignored. But I still love myself and love my life. At least I
can write up my thoughts. At least my life gives me the opportunity to
explore and focus on problems such as this.
Well, after Sarah and her mother finished the service, Sarah called me
in from the library to come to the coffee hour afterwards. I generally
would rather not, since it's hard for me to hear and most people are
not as interesting as whatever it is that I am reading. Even so, I can
use contact with others, and Sarah loves to show me off. This time
what I learned was extraordinary. I got to talking to a retired
Lieutenant General, Frank Camm, who moved into the Manhattan Project
after the civilian scientist left in 1946. (The retirement home, The
Fairfax, consists mostly of military men, though her stepfather,
Andrew Weber, was with the Army Corps of Engineers as a civilian who
worked on portable bridges, a fascinating subject.)
http://www.aog.usma.edu/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=592&srcid=446
http://www.zamandayolculuk.com/cetinbal/manhattanprojx.htm
We talked about Iran's getting the bomb. He convinced me that they
were aiming to build one, since they had so much oil that they hardly
needed a nuclear reactor to produce electricity. Sovereign states are
supposed to have weapons, I pointed out. Still, he replied, the United
States ought to prevent such proliferation.
I then recalled that in graduate school, we economics students would
talk about the ultimate consequences of a free-market in atomic bombs.
One would cost at most $1 million for the materials and the bomb
itself. He agreed with that and also with my observation that a major
effect would be a tremendous decentralization of the population. Just
imagine if those in Richmond threaten to nuke the feds if they keep
sending in their revenooers. This would have been much worse when it
made economic sense to have long assembly lines in huge factories, but
even now face-to-face contact remains of the greatest importance. I
can appreciate this, learning as I have that communication means
overhearing things as much as the literal text of words in formal
conversations. This leads me to reflect that, back in the Stone Age,
when our big brains served to coordinate social cooperation (still the
case) but when language was much more limited, that it is gestures and
other non-verbal forms of communication that mattered even more than
it does now. It takes big brains to decipher the subtleties of
non-verbal communication.
I told him about a military man at the annual Government Employee
Recognition Week on the Mall who told me that nuclear material is so
dangerous that one could not simply carry a bomb in one's backpack,
trying to take it up to the top of the Washington Monument, for more
than a few minutes without getting so much radiation that one would
die, or even place it in a desert cart and wheel it past incompetent
guards. No so, he told me. He had a live bomb in his office for
several weeks just a few feet from his desk! I suppose I should feel
afraid, very afraid, since I work about a mile from the Washington
Monument. He told me that making a bomb is not easy, nor getting
together enough fissionable material. I said you can get recipes off
the Web. Still, it's hard to do. Are the Iranians competent enough?
No, but they can get the plans from the Pakistanis. Where did they get
the plans. From the North Koreans. Why would the North Koreans sell
them the plans? Just for the money.
He was called away, but I do think that, unless there is a free-market
in bombs or the Iranians or whoever get quite a number of them, one
won't be wasted in D.C. Israel is far more likely to be the target.
I'm still a little worried, but not enough to quit my job and move to,
say, Charlottesville. I heard most of what he said. I used my external
uni-directional microphone. Andrea said I no longer needed to cart
around such things, that the tiny omni-directional mike that plugs
into my sound processor is good enough. Here she is just plainly
wrong, something rare for her.
That afternoon we went to a short service in the Little Georgetown
Church, as it's called, near Warrenton. My daughter, Alice, is buried
on the grounds there, along with Sarah's father and other family
members. Next to Sarah's family farm lived her grandmother's person
physician, Dr. William Hazel. They have family buried there, too, and
in attendance was Til Hazel and his wife Anne. They had fixed up a
small building, Helfin's Store, next to the church, and had a
reception there. Til is a big real estate developer in Northern
Virginia and a big contributor to George Mason University. Sarah and I
had dinner with them once at one of the Public Choice get togethers. I
told them of some ideas of mine to better put George Mason on the map.
One is to have one of the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies
to cover museum management. I pointed out that a famous study of elite
boards, corporate, financial, government, charitable, educational, and
so on, found that those in one group would commonly sit on boards of
another. Indeed, Anne sat on the board of the Corcoran Art Gallery. I
mentioned a friend who was the best student at my boarding school, who
got a B.A. in art history at Williams and went on to pick up an MBA at
Harvard. He became the director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, then
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and is now retiring as
director of the Dallas Museum of Art. What an inspired choice of
degrees! I said that if GMU could place museum directors, GMU's name
would become well-known to the elite. Anne loved my idea and will take
it up with the art department at GMU. Creating such a degree will take
very little.
I did not tell them of a far more ambitious project, namely for GMU to
field an entire School of Darwin Studies, after hosting a conference,
"Darwin across the Disciplines: The Re-Enchanted World Charles Darwin
Started." Sarah and I met President Alan Merten at a get-together (for
the second time, actually) and he asked for bold ideas for George
Mason. I sent a thirty-page proposal, detailing scholars in a score of
fields, who have used Darwin's ideas of random variation and natural
selection. But I never heard from him, not even a pro-forma reply.
Since several scholars with whom I had discussed my ideas pronounced
them excellent and my exposition coherent and persuasive, I can only
surmise that Merten grasped that the more conservative Christians in
the Virginia legislature would be so enraged that they would threaten
GMU's funding. But he knows better than to tell me so. Therefore,
silence.
I do get an astonishing amount of silence! He also did not respond to
my idea about an interdisciplinary degree in museum management.
I have a third idea, which Mrs. Hazel invited me to tell her about.
This is to put the great 78 rpm recordings of Victor and Columbia on a
server and let the world come to them and this spread GMU's fame. I
inherited a cassette collection of these 78s from an elementary school
teacher in Huron, SD, and culled 1000 of them that were just these
major albums. My hearing isn't at all up to running the cassettes into
my own computer. So someone would have to volunteer and also to build
a catalog. This I can do, since I have an excellent knowledge of these
great old recordings (which constitute, arguably, the core of Western
civilization itself), but I'd rather let someone else do the work, one
who knows more about servers and the technical aspects of them. Now I
can get a pocket hard drive to hold the music for under $100.
(Calculation: MP3 files eat up a Megabyte a minute. 90 minutes per
cassette, times 1000 cassettes, yields 90 gigabytes. However, this
drive would not be good enough to use on a server, if more than one
person wants to access it. A server-quality hard drive would cost
maybe ten times as much, and you'd also have to pay someone to
actually run the server. We're talking about pocket change (not MY
pocket!) here, if GMU can get the volunteers in the music or computer
science departments. It would be a great way for the music students
and faculty to learn these old recordings themselves!
There's been talk for over a decade about doing this, but those
involved turn their long noses down at using consumer-grade equipment
and not using transfer engineers to do a proper job of declicking and
centering the discs, but who charge $100 an hour, which is how long it
takes to transfer a single 4½ rpm side. But I have shared tapes with
collectors on six continents (none with Antarctica, alas) with great
pleasure.
Tuesday (November 6): Sound and Beyond, vowel recognition. I scored my
worst in two months. The way I listen for the odd voice out of three is
to try to hear the odd pitch. But my brain is trying to make me hear
high-low-high or low-high-low and thus always pick the second as the
odd voice out. So I must try hard to focus on a distinguishing mark
besides pitch.
Thursday (November 8): Sound and Beyond. I've gone through twenty-one
sessions now. Here are the results of testing, to show my progress:
Date Tone Envi M/F Vowe Cons Sent
TESTS
#Questions 60 25 48 48 40 25
Chance % 33 25 50 8 5 25
1 0717 100 44 52 8 5 96
2 0830 93 52 52 26 18 100
3 0926 93 56 90 30 28 100
4 1030 89 76 90 38 35 100
So:
Pure Tone Discrimination. I've actually gotten somewhat worse.
Environmental Sounds, like telling a fire alarm from a car screeching.
Steady improvement here.
Male/Female: Much improvement indeed.
Vowels: Slow but steady
Consonants: Ditto
Everyday Sentences: I'm perfect here, but the training sessions
involve various levels of background noise. For the tests, there is no
background noise at all. I shall definitely continue training!
-----WORD DISCRIMINATION----- --MUSIC--
Date Anim Food Colo Fami Numb Time Inst Melo
#Questions 50 50 50 50 50 50 18 16
Chance % 25 25 25 25 25 25 25 25
1 0717 76 82 86 82 80 88 39 50
2 0830 92 88 100 98 98 94 72 69
3 0926 96 96 98 96 100 100 94 75
4 1031 96 100 96 98 100 96 89 94
I'm making nice progress, especially on the music tests. Alas, I'm
practically perfect on a lot of these. (I put an rather awful high
school picture of myself with a newspaper cut out containing the words
"Practically Perfect" on the bookcase in the living room in the suite
in Lile House at U.Va. It was not universally appreciated. I've
repeated many, many times my score on a personality test I once took,
which said I was "nearly normal." This has been vigorously disputed!)
For all the tests, I strive to get as high as score as I possibly can,
repeating and repeating the sounds as necessary. But on this second
batch, since I am "practically perfect," what I'm doing is to get
additional training by not looking at the selections at all and then
clicking my guess. A normal person (I would never claim my hearing is
"nearly normal"!) is able to hear words without getting a set of
choices, not looking at the speaker either, and doing it all rapidly.
That's my goal, though I've been told that at best I'll be like
someone with a mild hearing loss (not really "nearly normal"), and so
I've been using the software in this way.
By now this flow of numbers is getting a little dull, and for me, too.
So I'll just chronicle the highlights.
Friday (November 9): I spent a good four hours plus talking with
Sharon Hamilton at the Midnight Mug, a little eatery at the library of
Georgetown University. She's teaching Shakespeare in her literature
class at George Mason, and I enlisted her to explain Shakespeare's
Sonnets to me. We went over three of them. They aren't as hard as I
had thought, not with her elucidating them, at any rate. We got to
talking about many, many other things as well. My hearing was
excellent! When we took a shuttle bus to Dupont Circle and it was too
dark to see her face, my hearing wasn't so good.
Saturday (November 10); I missed my teevee shows. No great loss, but
to make up for it, I spent two hours in training. I went through the
Dr. Seuss books for the first time in three months, with very nice
results. Closing my eyes and anticipating what was being said, though,
I didn't do very well, but they weren't fresh on my mind. I was able
to tell men's from women's voices quite well, though I didn't test
this by listening in with my meat ear.
I played a new iSong disk, which features popular works, arranged for
the piano as necessary:
Beethoven: Moonschein sonata, mvt. 1
Beethoven: Für Elise
Debussy: Claire de lune
Mozart: Rondo a la Turk
Bach: Jesu, joy of man's desiring
Rachmaninoff: 18th Paganini Variation
I only got through the Moonschein movement and was quite disappointed.
Still I got better as the session went on. Next time I'll report on
what may be my third book, tentatively entitled My Conversations with
a Brick Wall.
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