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▲ mk_stjames 3 hours ago

This is interesting and I'm going to write out my thoughts for you here. Just some impressions.

Right off the bat after skimming this I'm caught up with a detail that you confirm multiple times - that you can tell literally nothing apart given any input over 70 hz. You have had this measured a few times and you definitely say that nothing is coming across above 70 hz.

Yet you are trying to hear all sorts of things that have most all of their information content above 70hz.

The Hatsune Miku music? You're hearing the bass and the kick drums and maybe some subharmonics generated in the reverberation of the higher stuff. But that is a tiny fraction of the music, and, I hate to tell you this, but that computer girl singing is all way, waaay up higher than 70hz. The beautiful sounds you are getting across are the cool synth basses of all that music. It's very modern, punchy music and the bass of that type of electronic music is very different from other classical music so whatever modulation your implants are doing to it from 70 hz down likely sounds very cool compared to a lot of other music, for sure.

But, stop- you're getting nothing by noise and wind sounds with no information differentiation over 70hz because your brain isn't demodulating that information, maybe due to something about how the implant was... implanted... or just your specific condition, who knows, but what you can do is work in the band you have.

You mention not getting human voices because the fundamentals of human voices are more than 2x where your cutoff is.

Have you tried using a program like Audacity - or - Get claude to write a script for you that takes in MP3's of modern music and slows them down 300-400 %. The music will be very slow, but it will shift instruments from higher up (pianos, horns, people's signing) down into the 20-70 hz range, and you will maybe hear patterns that are new. Did no one in the study post-op sit with you and go thru this kind of thing? You have all these external trials listed but most all of it is moot if everything above 70hz is missing and you aren't able to modify the modulator hardware.

Note that the type of rhythms in the bass of the bass synthesizers of that Hatsune Miku tracks are different that the more complex rhythms and melodies played by instruments higher up (like pianos and lead synths). (This is true for most all music genres...) Shifting those higher up things down in frequency, even if that means they play back slower, may give you an different musical experience.

Continuously pegging your implant modulation hardware with frequency content above 70hz attempting to discover something about how it interacts with your brain when you continuously get nothing but broadband noise over 70hz seems like a dead end exercise.

I mean hell, have you tried putting a low pass filter to block out on everything in the music/microphone input above 70hz just to make sure that information isn't somehow overloading the way the implant works with your brain, and maybe just causing confusion.

Lastly it sounds like you could benefit from talking with someone with a real audio / digital signals processing / electrical engineering background that can inspect your hardware directly and make suggestions because educating yourself with just GPT runs might be spinning you in circles.

For instance... you mention things like " The logic of my test apps, which generate the test sounds and move the staircases, was checked with the Lean 4 formal verifier,"

Man... this has nothing to do with needing a 'Lean 4 formal verifier' to check your app or whatever. You need someone to sit with you and your damn hardware and work with some audio input. You need the someone that setup the original implant modular to explain the hardware mapping and filtering options to you and see if you can go back and change how that works, to get more options. You're getting some wildly mixed signals (bad pun) about how all this works, I think.

▲bscphil 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Have you tried using a program like Audacity - or - Get claude to write a script for you that takes in MP3's of modern music and slows them down 300-400 %. The music will be very slow, but it will shift instruments from higher up (pianos, horns, people's signing) down into the 20-70 hz range, and you will maybe hear patterns that are new

You don't need to slow them down, you can just pitch shift everything into the 0-70 hz range. If there were a way to figure out how his brain is demodulating the signal, you might even get something pretty reasonable out - the essay describes sounds like cars as hissy rather than heavy.

The real difficulty is keeping genuinely inaudible frequencies (<40 hz? but who knows how his implant works) from swamping the rest, I would think.

▲mk_stjames 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I didn't mention just pitch shifting alone without speed change as depending on how that is done it can introduce artifacts. So just slowing things down like an oldschool tape player is the most 'pure'.

Any computer sound card will high-pass anything over about 16-18 hz and thus new lower stuff won't swamp, and it seems like his implant amplifier does indeed deal with low frequencies because he mentions using an 18hz tone to keep the device key'ed on.

Another thing then to mention would be 'binning' audio that has been pitch shifted own using notch filters / comb filters. Because it is possible that however the implant is wired could use some band gaps to help his brain 'decode' things more clearly and less muddy.

Again, all this is simple shit and I find it really surprising that there isn't someone to help run these tests on hardware with this person, and their blog post here has this very strange rabbit hole feel to it and I can't tell if it is because there is a lot lost in translation, or if there is a lot more to this that is coming across in translation... or if this person in being led down some near-AI-psycosis and is struggling because they simply don't have someone to sit with that can help.

It all comes off to me as very, very strange.

▲ink_13 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, ordinary hearing is normally quoted as 20Hz to 20kHz, but most people are hearing mostly between 2000 to 5000Hz. If truly there was no perception above 70Hz that would lead to a very muddy and indistinguishable soundscape.

Wikipedia is not bad on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range

▲bscphil 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> most people are hearing mostly between 2000 to 5000Hz

That's pretty misleading, we tend to have excellent hearing anywhere in the 100 hz - 6000 hz range. Much of music and all fundamental frequencies produced by the human voice (except people with very rare whistle register abilities) is below 2000 hz. We're most sensitive to the range you're talking about because it's the most useful for discriminating between different sounds, but still only slightly more sensitive to that range than to lower frequencies.