Sometimes at night I lay awake for hours thinking about the issues of the world and how to make existing things better. So today I’m going to go a bit off-topic and talk about an idea I had in regards to learning how to speak if you are deaf.
I am not deaf and have basically no knowledge as to what tools and techniques are already in place to help aid those who cannot hear, my idea may already exist and may already be in use, I really have no idea.
The concept is really pretty simple: Every voice or sound creates a sound wave which can be easily viewed using various instruments. If a person says “Dog” it will create what I would expect to be a fairly consistent sound wave shape no matter who is actually saying the word. Every letter or general sound would work the same way, if someone says “B” it will have a pretty specific sound wave.
To me it makes sense then to have someone speak each letter of the alphabet into a machine and record each sound wave as an image or video clip. Then have a deaf person who is learning to speak, talk into the same device in real-time, while speaking the word the deaf person will be able to see what their voice or sound wave looks like compared to the sound wave example. If the deaf person repeats the word, letter or sound over and over again in various ways while each time trying to make their sound wave as similar to the example sound wave as possible then eventually they will line up or at least get very close.
Once the sound waves line up as much as possible, in theory the deaf person could then very easily speak that word, letter or sound. With practice and learning as many words and letters as possible, eventually the deaf person will be able to speak as clearly and well as someone who can hear.
If you look at really good musicians they do something very similar when tuning their instruments, their ears have been trained to hear when a string is not in tune. A musician may ask a neighbor who is in tune to play a certain note so that they can tune their own instrument to match it, this technique works really well.
So what is the difference between matching a tone by hearing it versus matching a tone by seeing it?
What are your thoughts? Does this idea already exist and is it being used today? Is my idea ridiculous or seem reasonable? Let me know your thoughts, would love to hear your perspective.
