Imagine being plunged perpetually into a silence where the ubiquity of sound is irrelevant. That is the world which many students in my high school experience. My inspiration for this project really came from the students in my high school’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) program. My school has a department which offers a high school education to DHH students across Orange County. The students in this program take many of the same classes as the other students, using an interpreter to understand the lectures. I befriended several DHH students, but one in particular stood out to me: a boy in Cross Country who was deaf but used a device called the cochlear implant to hear. During the team’s annual trip to Yosemite each summer, he picked a song on a friend’s MP3 player and played it. He then told the group that the song he chose was his favorite song. This moment inspired me, as it showed me that even deaf individuals could find enjoyment from music. As a pianist for 12 years, I felt an urge to help him and other DHH students fully experience the wonders of music … So let me give a bit of background information on the cochlear implant. The cochlear implant bypasses the outer, middle, and inner ear by sending electrical stimulation directly up the auditory nerve to the temporal lobes of the brain. This electrical stimulation mimics the natural electrical signals produced by the hair cells in the cochlea, and the implant users are able to interpret this as sound. Because it completely bypasses the ear, this device enables otherwise deaf or critically hard of hearing individuals to hear.

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