As we approach another New Year, let’s look at the ever-changing technological world we live in. Have you ever wondered what Wi-Fi sounded like? Well, unexpectedly, now you can experience this other layer to our expanding technological world – and, get this – you can do it with the help of hearing aids.
A writer for New Scientist, Frank Swain, teamed up with software engineer and sound artist Daniel Jones to create a project called Phantom Terrains. Swain, an individual with progressive hearing loss, wanted the project to change the way we look at hearing aids; according to their site, “the project challenges the notion of assistive hearing technology as a prosthetic, reimagining it as an enhancement that can surpass the ability of normal human hearing.”
Wireless networks, data – they make up a world totally invisible to us. But Phantom Terrains has translated the wireless networks’ traits into audible sound, which they then stream into a pair of Starkey Bluetooth Halo hearing aids. The wearer can then hear the data that surrounds him at any given moment. Each network is given a specific sound or melody, so that the user can recognize the use of Verizon, AT&T, and more just by listening. “Network identifiers, data rates, and encryption modes are translated into sonic parameters.” This might sound a little overwhelming, but we’d have to admit that the ability to sense this unseen world is pretty cool.
The sounds are a bit alien-like – you can experience them for yourself here, at the bottom of their page. But each sound denotes a meaning: the denser the crackling noises you hear, the more networks there are in a given area; the faster the clicking noises, the stronger the router signal, and thus the closer you are to a router (and if it’s on your left, you’ll hear it in your left ear, and vice versa); and the musical melody you hear is a given network ID, which changes router to router.
With this new experiment, Phantom Terrains is reaching toward a different kind of communication with an “augmented reality that can immerse us in continuous, dynamic streams of data.” These days, most of us are already glued to technology, but this surpasses our dependent relationship and allows us to look – or hear 
– behind the scenes.
According to Liz Stinson, writer for Wired Magazine, this project “gets to a bigger point about the way we interact with and comprehend information. Hearing, like seeing, is just another way to process the world around us. And it’s a highly efficient one at that. Even more so than our eyes, our ears are adept at gathering and comprehending vast amounts of complex data quickly and easily . . . this makes sonification a smart way to process an unwieldy set of data.” But you can decide for yourself how immersed you want to be in the digital world – with this new development, you can hear exactly how connected our world is with technology.
So here’s a fun takeaway from all this: your hearing loss can be a superpower – a “superability,” says Stinson – with the help of a pair of hearing aids.
