It's surgically placed inside the inner ear.

And this is really unheard of stuff, and this is all because of this technology.

Cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between these instruments.

And there's no way that you can't look at that as an overwhelming success.

But here is that same girl who is implanted now.

Most cochlear implant users cannot tell the difference between an instrument.

He's deaf, and he learned to play the piano after he received the cochlear implant.

Girl I just take off my CI, and I don't hear anything.

And now today we have the modern multi channel cochlear implant, which is an outpatient procedure.

When I was 12 years old, I was one of the first few people in Singapore who underwent cochlear implantation.

But there's millions of deaf people in the world, and the Cochlear implant has given hearing to thousands of deaf people now.

We would be thrilled if we had one semitone pitch perception in cochlear implant users.

Now we've been doing some studies to really get a sense of what sound quality is like for these implant users.

This implant is not transmitting the quality of music that usually provides things like warmth.

You would think that because these implants are optimized for speech, they were designed for speech.

And this is a video that was taken by my surgical mentor, Dr. John Niparko, who implanted her.

Turns out that if you have hearing loss, most people that lose their hearing lose it at what's called the cochlea, the inner ear.

Truth of the matter is you can play the piano without a cochlear implant, because all you have to do is press the keys at the right time.

I've been very lucky to work with Dr. David Ryugo where I've been working on deaf cats that are white and trying to figure out what happens when we give them cochlear implants.

Nevertheless, the availability of such technologies has already begun to cause friction. For example, many in the deaf community have rejected cochlear implants, because they do not regard deafness as a disability that needs to be corrected, but as a part of their life and cultural identity.

So if we had to design a perfect cochlear implant, what we would try to do is target it to be able to allow music transmission.

And now you have cochlear implants that go into people's heads and allow the deaf to begin to hear.

The sound quality, or the sound of the sound is how I like to describe timbre, tone color they cannot tell these things whatsoever.

Maybe 100,000 people have Cochlear implants, which allow them to hear.

In fact, most implant users really struggle and dislike music because it sounds so bad.

And in the end, you achieve something like this where an electrode array is inserted inside the cochlea.

But actually if you look at melody, what you find is that there's very little cortical activity in implant users compared with normal hearing controls.

However, despite this incredible facility that some cochlear implant users display with language, you turn on the radio and all of a sudden they can't hear music almost at all.

Charles Limb performs cochlear implantation, a surgery that treats hearing loss and can restore the ability to hear speech. But as a musician too, Limb thinks about what the implants lack They don't let you fully experience music yet. At TEDMED, Limb reviews the state of the art and the way forward.

So for whatever reason, this implant is not successfully stimulating auditory cortices during melody perception.

Now if you look at the brain of an individual who has a cochlear implant and you have them listen to speech, have them listen to rhythm and have them listen to melody, what you find is that the auditory cortex is the most active during speech.

And it's based on the cochlear of your ear, able to pick up internet, wireless, television signals and radio signals, in the same chip.

Now the next question is, well how does it really sound?

The Snail.

Do you raise snails?

Try hunting snails, daddyo.

Do you eat snails?

Do you eat snails?

Look, my little snail.

They got shacks up to seven stories

And for Parkinson's disease, Cochlear implants, these have indeed been able to bring some kind of remedy to people with certain kinds of disorder.

This is a Dionaea, a Venus fly trap hunting snails sorry for the snail.

The snail retreated into its shell.

A snail's shell is spiral in form.

The snail drew in its feelers.