There are things that people with perfect hearing take for granted. The ability to hear sound underwater is one of them. At first thought, it may not seem like such a big deal; but imagine the delight you experienced, sitting at the bottom of a pool as a kid, and listening to the exaggerated echoes ricocheting off the concrete walls or the wahh wahhh wahh as your mom tried to call you out of the water.
Zoe Gershuny, 18, had never heard any of that … until this week. Zoe was born with profound hearing loss. Today, she can hear practically as well as a person with normal hearing due to cochlear implants which allow her to hear normally when a direct signal is sent to the brain generated through artificial electronic means. But because those implants are controlled by electronics, she has to remove them when she gets in the water. So when Zoe swims in a pool or in the ocean, the world goes quiet.
This week Zoe (below, left) is visiting the Peruvian Amazon, a spectacular place to experience sound on the ground, in the air and underwater, with the organizations Hear the World and Global Explorers.
The process of transmitting sound from below the surface of the Amazon river started with Katy Warner (below, right), an acoustic technician with the National Parks Service’s Natural Sounds Program.
Warner brought with her a brand new underwater microphone. She connected that to an MP3 recorder which could broadcast the sound through a speaker.
The next step (sometimes it really does take a village) was masterminded by group leader, adventurer and inspirational speaker Bill Barkeley, who because of Usher Syndrome became deaf as a young child and has been going blind since he was a teenager.
Barkeley, hooked up a Phonak SmartLink microphone and transmitter to Warner’s underwater device. It allowed the sounds from underwater to be transmitted to a hearing aid or cochlear implant through a blue tooth signal.
“The most incredible thing about it is the bridge between the digital divide,” Barkeley explained. It represented a first for him too. At age, 48, Barkeley had also never heard sound underwater.
“It was a completely different dimension of sound. It was more subdued and I could feel it pulsing more. It was so cool to experience it the same way other people experience it.”
And with the help of the 3,000 species occupying the muddy brown expanse of the Amazon, including piranhas, pink dolphins, catfish and stingrays, Zoe and Bill had plenty to hear, an occurrence that elicited a giddy school girl shriek the first time Zoe was able to hear something bubbling beneath the surface, and something similar, though much more manly from Bill.
“I could hear a whoosh, whoosh sound and that was amazing because if my cochlear implant gets wet then I will have to get another one and they’re expensive,” Zoe reflected. “I could hear the splashing sounds. It was very real. In movies, they exaggerate the sounds underwater to make it more exciting, but this was so awesome because it was so real.”
What Zoe didn’t need her hearing to enjoy was joining the rest of her group, a mixture of students with perfect hearing and some with hearing disabilities, in taking a bath in the warm squishy mud of the middle of the Amazon. The laughter as she and her friends sank deep into the marshmallowy mush didn’t need to be audible to be felt and enjoyed.
Photos by Jo Piazza.