"7 's up" - how bout music for your KK

Interesting article in The Age this morning got me to thinking about how life would be without music

Hi-fi quest is music to the ears of the deaf
• Nick Miller
• December 18, 2008 from The Age
WEEKS before his death last year, the world's first bionic ear recipient, Rod Saunders, told its inventor, Professor Graeme Clark, that the thing he missed most was music.
He used to sing in a choir. But while the cochlear implant restored his ability to understand speech, any music more complicated than a simple melody came through as a bewildering mess of noise.
More than 30 years on, Professor Clark believes a "hi-fi" bionic ear, allowing the deaf to hear music, is only a few years away. Such a prototype will also much better distinguish speech against a noisy background.
"Rod did miss music. He would have loved to be able to sing in the choir again," Professor Clark said yesterday. "But it's 'hearing in noise' that really kills deaf people with implants — and people with hearing aids. That's an ongoing challenge which we hope we can solve by giving high-fidelity hearing."
Yesterday he unveiled an early, animal-based prototype at La Trobe University, where he will lead the Graeme Clark Hearing and Neuroscience Unit in the university's School of Psychological Science.
The new unit brings together specialists in hearing, speech and language, in much the same way as Professor Clark's original team that began work on the bionic ear. "The passion I still have is to get high-fidelity sound with the bionic ear," he said. "We now have 'first-innings points' but I want to see that we win outright."
The work will require breakthrough understanding about the way the ear processes sound, and the way it "locks" into sounds it is most interested in, such as speech. Professor Clark said that, with some extra funding, his team could have a working prototype in a human patient in two or three years.