On May 3rd, 1948, at 2:39 AM, a girl named Aria Korine was born. Her parents,
James and Pauline, looked down at their firstborn baby with overwhelming wonder,
love, and nerves, feeling each in forms they never had before, eager to witness how
their daughter would experience the world. On September 12th, 1948, James and Pauline
realized something was wrong. At four months old, Aria still seemed extremely detached
and unresponsive. When they said things to her or made noises at or around her,
she seemed to mostly ignore or not notice them. At first, they assumed it was normal,
nothing more than the still developing awareness of an embryonic mind. But as more time had passed,
they had become increasingly concerned. On September 16th, 1948, just a few days later,
it was discovered by Aria’s doctor that she had been born deaf.
By age two, it was clear that Aria was the sort of deaf that was profound, in which no hearing
aids would aid her in any way. James and Pauline were told that Aria would never hear anything.
Devastated by the thought of Aria never being able to hear their voices or have her own, hear
birds chirp, waves crash, or the sound of music, Pauline burst into tears upon hearing the news.
James consoled her, trying to maintain a more stoic demeaner, but was nonetheless
tearing up and feeling the same. As Aria grew into a young child,
she would live a relatively normal life in the best way she could. She performed well in school,
was excellent at arts, and navigated childhood social life. Of course, all of this and daily
life in general was made uniquely challenging and nuanced for her. Although she adapted fairly well,
being as positive and resilient as she could, she was often extremely frustrated and upset by
her deafness. Like other girls her age, Aria had big dreams and aspirations for her life.
Unlike other girls her age, one of Aria’s biggest dreams was simply to hear.
When Aria was seven years old, while her and her father were out running some errands in downtown,
they happened by a group of street performers playing popular rock music.
A large crowd was gathered around them, moving in synchronization—a
pulsating mass of human psychology pushed and pulled by invisible waves in the air.
Aria observed and pondered the scene as she approached, now at an age where her
youthful curiosity met an intellect that was capable of contemplating nuanced questions
about its own limitations. Aria only thought in terms of ASL, or American Sign Language, and so,
her internal monologue was more or less the sensation of moving hands, making understanding
what she was witnessing on that street corner simultaneously impossible and fascinating. Without
realizing or meaning to, Aria stopped walking. James quickly noticed and stopped as well.
After a moment passed, James signed to Aria, “Everything ok?”
Aria didn’t notice, so James tapped her on the shoulder, which quickly jolted her back.
“Are you ok?” he signed again. “Yes,” Aria signed back, beginning to walk again.
After a few steps, Aria tapped her father on the side with a sort of innocent expression
on her face that was simultaneously frustrated with its own innocence.
“What did the music sound like?” Aria signed.
Her father thought to himself for a moment, then signed, “It was big and heavy. Passionate. Very
intense. It made me want to move my head.” Aria paused briefly.
“Why does it do that? There’s something in the sound that makes you feel heavy?”
Perplexed by the challenge of explaining music without using sonic terms, James clumsily signed
back, “It connects with you…it connects with your soul, your core. It overcomes your whole body.”
He grabbed Aria and sort of swayed her back and forth gently. Aria had no idea what he
meant but indicated that she understood enough by softly smiling and laughing. The
two then continued on about their day, quietly remaining deeply affected by the conversation.
As Aria aged into and through high school, she grew more comfortable with being deaf,
adopting and treating it, at least at times, as a positive aspect of her identity.
However, she of course continued to deal with its inevitable challenges and continued to ask
and wonder about the strange auditory phenomena that she was removed from. Around this time,
she began to fall in love with reading and writing, spending much of her free time
engaging in literature of all forms—her favorite being non-fiction about science, technology,
and especially music and musicians, captivated by the idea of what music was, how it worked,
and why it seemed to affect everyone so strongly. She felt a strange curiosity, longing, and almost
spiritual mystique when she read passages by the likes of writers like Arthur Schopenhauer,
who wrote, “The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise
quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable,
is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being,
but entirely without reality and remote from its pain…This object is directly the will;
and this is essentially the most serious of all things, as being that on which all depends.”
On September 1st, 1970, when Aria was just twenty-two years old, she wrote and published her
first book titled Deafness & Technology. The book was a non-fiction piece about her experience with
deafness and the current state of technology in the hearing aid industry. In which, she discussed
her hope and optimism for technology’s potential in assisting with deafness and other sensory
impairments, while interweaving her own philosophy of life and view of humanity—a creature,
in her mind, profoundly capable of overcoming adversity and achieving supernatural-like
accomplishments. In the preface of the book, Aria wrote, “My dream is unlike most other dreams.
Yes, I want to accomplish many things related to a family, a career, and so on. But my dreams also
include everyday normal stuff that most people take for granted. I dream that one day I will
know what a voice sounds like. I dream that I will be able to know when someone in the other
room wants me without them having to leave that room. I dream that I will be able to go to dinner
and understand and follow the conversations. I dream that I will know what the forest, the beach,
or the supposed ambience of a room sounds like. And most of all, I dream that, at least once
before I die, I will know what music sounds like. I know this dream is far-fetched to
most and upsetting to some, but that is why it is a dream, and that is why it is my dream.
They say you don’t know what you are missing if you’ve never had it, but I can assure you that
this isn’t true. I am proud of my deafness, but from the faces I have seen change from sounds
I cannot hear, I know I am missing something. And if there is one thing my experience has taught me
that I want this book to share is that whatever you are not missing, don’t take it for granted.”
In Aria’s twenties, she would graduate college with a bachelor’s degree in professional writing,
marry her boyfriend, Tom, and soon have her first and only child, Mathew.
Deafness & Technology would go on to do moderately well, ultimately spurring her a modest career as
an author and contributing writer for a variety of print publications. Her work was well-written
and widely enjoyed but also critiqued by some of the deaf community as well as viewed as naïve
and overly romantic in terms of serious technological and medical understanding.
As time would pass, however, despite the medical and scientific consensus having almost universally
been in contradiction to Aria’s hopes, things would seemingly begin to change.
In 1972, a medical device known as a single channel cochlear implant would be introduced to
the market. The device would utilize a single electrode contact that was implanted into the
user’s cochlea, the spiral-shaped cavity part of the inner ear involved with hearing. The device
would then provide electrical stimulation to the auditory nerve fibers and essentially allow for
the possibility of timing and loudness cues for hard of hearing or deaf individuals. Throughout
the 70s, over 1,000 people were implanted with the device, providing some of them with speechreading
improvements. However, research still indicated that the device was extremely limited,
or even useless in most cases, as it couldn’t stimulate different areas of the cochlea well
enough to differentiate between different sound frequencies, and so, it mostly just created noise.
By the end of the decade, it was still largely believed by all experts that something effective
of this nature was impossible. But for the first time, the impossibility was at least questioned.
Over a decade would go by. Very little public progress would be made in the technology,
and the single-channel cochlear implant would seem, especially for individuals like Aria,
to be more of a problem than it was worth. In 1985, however, a company called Cochlear Limited
would release the first ever multi-channel cochlear implant known as the Nucleus 22.
This device utilized an intracochlear electrode array that consisted of multiple contact points,
which, as more time passed and the technology developed further, would allow for the
transmission of different frequencies, including ones relevant to speech. For the
first time in human history, differentiated sound perception in deaf individuals was made possible.
On December 3rd, 1991, after lots of research, debate, and sleepless nights of contemplation,
at age forty-two, Aria would undergo cochlear implant surgery and receive the Nucleus 22.
Several weeks later, Aria sat in her audiologist’s office. Her husband,
Tom, sat next to her, holding her hand. Her father, James, sat in a chair behind them.
“Are you ready?” the audiologist said and signed to Aria.
“Yes,” Aria signed back. “Now it’s probably going to
be really soft at first. You might not notice anything, but I’m going to slowly turn it up,
and then it’ll probably sound pretty strange, but like I said, that’s normal. Your brain will
get more used to it in time. But just let me know if you want me to turn it off at any time. Ok?”
“Ok,” Aria signed back. The audiologist turned the device on, and then up.
“Anything?” “No.”
She turned it up more. A brief silence filled the room. Then, Aria’s hands covered her mouth,
and her eyes filled with tears. On January 3rd, 1992, Aria heard sound for the first time.
When everyone realized what was happening, there was not a dry eye in the room. Overwhelmed,
Aria nearly passed out, quickly needing to be comforted and for the audiologist
to turn the device back down. The device did not come without
its own difficulties and issues. Aria found the experience, especially initially, to be somewhat
uncomfortable, overwhelming, and even painful at times. She spent a huge amount of time and effort
working with her audiologist to properly deal with it and better develop her hearing processing,
which was not easy nor quick. Moreover, the quality of the device was still quite limited,
and although it got better over time, Aria still couldn’t hear normally, nor could she, to great
disappointment, process things like music, which mostly just sounded like beeping and buzzing.
Despite the challenges and difficulties, though, Aria kept the device in and on, deeply grateful
and elated over the benefits and new life she now had with some access to the dimension of sound.
Over the following several decades, Aria would continue to live a normal life,
continuing as a writer, wife, mother, and soon to be grandmother.
Throughout this time, Cochlear Limited would come out with several sound processor upgrades
designed to increase the processing power of the implant device and provide a more comfortable,
improved listening experience for users. A couple of which Aria opted in for.
On February 23rd, 2032, when Aria was in her eighties,
one of the processor upgrades coupled with a new brain-machine interface hardware upgrade
had the potential to effectively process, for the first time, the pitch of voices and instruments
and the timbre of musical arrangements. On July 1st, 2033, when Aria was eighty-five
years old, she once again found herself in an audiologist’s office. With a flip of a
digital switch, the audiologist turned Aria’s device, now modified with this latest upgrade,
and then, from a small speaker placed on his desk, played the song, Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy.
A collection of sonic notes arranged and stacked in perfect, specific patterns met at
the intersection of chaos and order, meaning and meaninglessness inside Aria’s brain. For the first
time in her life, on this day, Aria heard what music sounded like. She sat, overwhelmed and numb.
“What does it sound like?” Tom asked after a moment passed and Aria hadn’t said anything.
Aria looked at Tom with tears rolling down her clenched cheeks that now held open a smile.
Then she said, “I understand the nature of everything.”