Plugin to simulate effects of cochlear implant ?

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

Recently I was listening to these cochlear implant demos, that show the rest of us hearing folk what it is like to hear with an implant. These demos are very interesting, but also annoyingly short in length:

Audio Demos for Speech Perception
http://www.hei.org/research/aip/audiodemos.htm

Is it possible to write a plugin for Audacity that can do these envelope functions? This topic is way over my head, and so I’m putting this message here as a sort of public service request to the envelope-writing experts.

Having such a plugin for a free open-source program like Audacity might well improve the lives of people with implants, because it will allow the rest of us to experiment with the plugin, to discover for ourselves what various forms of audio may sound like to someone with an implant.


Possible starting points:

Cochlear Implants: A Tutorial from Sound to Stimulus
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ueda/cochlear/

MATLAB - Implant Signal Processing example (plain text file):
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ueda/cochlear/sim2.m


-Javik

2

It’s absolutely possible. Including the Matlab code was a very good idea, too.

As far as I can tell, the audio processing involved is very similar (if not identical to) a vocoder. There might even be a Nyquist Vocoder plugin that you can use right now.

If that’s not the case, then the big problem is getting someone to code it. It’s going to be quite a bit of work. Unfortunately, I don’t have the expertise to do it myself.

Good luck, this is a noble goal.