ATLAS

Suddenly Silent

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Feb 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Suddenly Silent Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 02/01/2020 - 00:00

Eric Gershon

Michelle Galetti had good reason to leave college. She chose to stay.

Michelle Galetti (TAM’20) was about halfway into a three-week backpacking trip in Washington State when it happened. Hiking down a mountainside in a heavy rain, just below the tree line, her hearing cut out.

“All of a sudden, the raindrops — I couldn’t hear them anymore,” she said of the summer 2018 episode, shortly before the start of her junior year at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder.

A stream rushed along nearby, totally silent to her.

“I started stomping on sticks to see if I could hear them break,” said Michelle.

“I couldn’t hear myself breathe.”

She could not. “I couldn’t hear myself breathe,” she said.

In the weeks ahead, her hearing came and went, typically for periods of 30 to 60 minutes. Eventually it was happening daily. She developed vertigo. Doctors at home in Seattle offered theories, but could not explain it or fix it.

Michelle returned to Boulder, where she continued consulting doctors. She didn’t know when things might get better. One September morning they got much worse.

She was getting ready for the day in her off-campus apartment when, at 7:45 a.m., the sound went out and didn’t come back.

The technology, arts and media (TAM) major and teaching assistant was scheduled to lead a web-design lab at 9:30.

“She said, ‘I guess I'll go to class and just do this,’” said her mother, Beth Galetti, who was visiting.

Michelle addressed the students. “Face me,” she said.

She would try to read lips.

Adapting

Michelle briefly considered leaving school, but she chose to stay. Otherwise, “It would have given me too much time to think about what I’d lost, and not enough time to figure out what I can still do,” she said. “Which I’m finding out every day is still a lot.”

With the help of her mother and stepfather, Jeff VanLaningham, who, taking turns, spent months in Boulder helping her adjust, Michelle embarked on a new life.

She replaced her alarm clock with a device called “the sonic bomb” that woke her by vibrating her mattress. She identified friends and, eventually, professional captioners, who could supplement her class notes, in case she’d missed something. She and her �鶹��Ѱ��equestrian teammates devised a series of hand signals so she could get commands during competitions. And she began intensive lip-reading and vocalization exercises.

Without constant sonic feedback, humans’ ability to speak devolves quickly. Michelle spent hours a day with her hand pressed to her mother’s throat, feeling and mimicking the vibrations unique to each word as her mother spoke them.

“It took a little while for me to get comfortable speaking in class,” Michelle said. “A lot of people didn’t understand why I spoke with my hand on my throat.”

There have been frustrations, indignities and fears. Lip-reading is exhausting in the best circumstances; when fellow students mumble during group presentations, it’s impossible. Airline employees, unaware Michelle can’t hear announcements, scold her for boarding with the wrong group. In the absence of sound, darkness carries a new sense of menace.

Michelle embarked on a new life.

Group conversation, with its frequent and sudden changes of speaker, is hard to follow. Michelle misses a lot of jokes.

But some inconveniences have revealed an upside. Calling from one room to another at home is pointless, for instance, so she has more face-to-face encounters with friends and family.

And many people have been reflexively supportive, including professors in CU’s ATLAS Institute who began adding closed captions to old videos and classmates who, especially in the scary early days, went out of their way to be present with her, there to help as she navigates a silent world.

And there have been unexpected moments of pleasure.

“One of her favorite things to do was to blare music in the car so that she could feel the vibrations in the speakers, and try to guess the song,” said Beth Galetti. “She was remarkably good at it.”

That first soundless semester, and the next, Michelle took a full course load. She earned a 4.0 grade point average twice.

“Anything’s possible,” she said.

History

Hearing trouble was not entirely new for Michelle, now 21. Since childhood, she’d been unable to detect high-frequency sounds — s, h and f sounds, for example — and she began using hearing aids regularly in high school.

But outside the high frequencies, she could hear clearly. The doctors she and her family consulted told her “there’s zero percent chance that you will ever go deaf,” she said.

After she did, new information came to light. Hearing kept her paternal grandfather out of the Air Force, and a paternal great aunt went totally deaf at 22.

Michelle’s biological father, Matt Galetti, died when she was a toddler. He’d never had reason, or perhaps time, to mention these details, if he even knew them. Michelle’s mom wasn’t aware of them until news of her hearing loss began circulating.

With the new information, the Galettis shifted their thinking away from a presumed neurological cause.

“There’s got to be something genetic,” Michelle said, “because this doesn’t just happen.”

She took a battery of genetic tests and forged ahead with her life as she awaited the results. She joined CU’s equestrian team and took part-time jobs with a technology startup. She got a puppy, a Basenji she named Kaila. She went on adventures with her boyfriend, Aaron.

In March of 2019, after six months of total deafness, while doing homework at the home of Aaron’s family, a crackling she’d felt in her ears for 36 hours suddenly stopped. She set her pencil down. It hit the table “kind of loud,” she thought. “I’m probably just hallucinating.”

“I can live any way now. ... It’s not something I’m scared of anymore.”

She asked Aaron to clap in her ear.

“I was like, ‘Wow, not so loud!’”

He said, “Michelle, do you realize what you just said?”

It was sound, and it was a jubilant moment. But at first, everything was painfully loud, and Michelle soon realized that true hearing hadn’t really come back. She could detect sound, but not words.

“Everything still sounds like a mumble,” she said months later, “a hum.”

When the results of the genetic tests came in last summer, they revealed a mutation in a gene called ATP2B2, sometimes called a “deafness gene” for its role in some types of hearing loss.

Knowing this offered some relief, she said: “I’m not so alone in the situation anymore.” But she doesn’t expect much to come of it. There’s no associated treatment.

She’s at peace with that.

“I can live any way now,” she said, hearing or totally deaf or someplace between. “It’s not something I’m scared of anymore.”

The Jacket

A few months into Michelle’s ordeal, she decided she would use her remaining time at �鶹��Ѱ��to develop a product that would give deaf people an experience of music.

The jacket will be fashionable as well as functional.

Working with Daniel Leithinger, a computer scientist in �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s ATLAS Institute, she has been developing a sensor-laden jacket that will vibrate and pulse in response to sound frequencies. When a note or combination of notes sounds, sensors embedded in the jacket will vibrate in a corresponding way, providing a pattern of physical sensation.

“Hearing is really just another form of touch,” Michelle said.

The jacket — which she wants to be fashionable as well as functional, so it doesn’t mark the wearer as disabled — is a form of haptic technology, a category that usually involves blending digital and physical experience.

“Michelle has come to this project with amazing motivation,” said Leithinger, whose work at �鶹��Ѱ��and, earlier, at MIT’s Media Lab, focuses on inventing new computer interfaces that let people interact with data through touching, grasping and deforming. “This was shaped by her personal experience, but also the drive to create a simple, inexpensive device for others based on open-source tools.”

With the help of a grant from CU’s undergraduate research opportunities program, Galetti stayed at �鶹��Ѱ��last summer to work with him. She continues to work on it as a side project, in addition to an astonishing variety of other activities.

She’s been named an engineering fellow, a mentoring program for engineering students (TAM students are part of the engineering school). She continues her work with the startups. She rides horses. She’s been learning sign language.

The range of sound accessible to humans with standard hearing runs from about 20 hertz (a tuba, roughly) to 20,000 hertz (extreme shrillness). Galetti wants her jacket to translate the full range.

“I want to access extremes,” she said.

Photos by Glenn Asakawa

Michelle Galetti had good reason to leave college. She chose to stay.

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No Piano? No Problem

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 20:02:00 +0000

No Piano? No Problem Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/01/2017 - 14:02

Christie Sounart

Kristof Klipfel (TAM’17) disappeared for a moment.

“Sorry, I get into this,” he said distractedly, absorbed in the blues beats he was making on the fly.

Satisfied with his rhythm, he looped the track on his laptop and began overlaying new notes in the key of A. Music boomed, though no instrument was in sight.

No traditional instrument, anyway — Klipfel was making music through the gloves on his hands, using an ordinary table as his keyboard.

He continued drumming his fingers, encased in a pair of black construction gloves covered in buttons, switches and wires connected to his laptop. The harder he pressed, the louder the sound of specific notes played. Flexing his fingers triggered a sensor that adjusted overall volume and sound distribution. By flicking a switch on the side of a finger, he could shift from piano to drums or saxophone.

Software on his laptop recorded it all.

“You’re always in the right key and the right scale,” said the inventor, a 22-year-old senior from Reno, Nev.

Klipfel calls his device MIDI motion gloves. MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface, which links electronic instruments and enables them to communicate.

Basically, he said of the gloves, “It’s a wearable electronic musical instrument.”

Klipfel is not the first person to develop musical gloves. But his are unique in their ability to generate any note in any key for major, minor, blues and pentatonic scales.

A musician since 6th grade, when he began playing saxophone, Klipfel eventually learned dozens of instruments, including the trombone, drums and piano. He started composing electronic music in high school.

Klipfel designed the gloves in spring 2016 for a course on wearable technologies in the ATLAS Institute, part of the College of Engineering & Applied Science.

“I got tired of playing piano, then jumping to the computer and back and forth,” he said.

He realized MIDI might offer a solution.

“The gloves as a whole are a MIDI controller,” he said. “They send specific signals to the music software, which then interprets the signal and triggers any sound I define within the program.”

The gloves were Klipfel’s first experience with circuitry and robotics, and he spent a lot of time on Google figuring out how to make everything work. The project cost him about $300.

“I advised Kristof to start with one sensor on his glove and go from there,” said Alicia Gibb, his instructor. “He came in the next class with five sensors working on one glove. From that point, I knew these gloves were going to be epic.”

In March, Klipfel took the gloves to Hiyoshi, Japan, for the Tangible Embedded and Embodied Interactions conference. There he showed them off for hundreds of people at a student design challenge — and walked away with the award for best project implementation.

As far as Klipfel is aware, none of the other music gloves on the market have as much flexibility in sound as his do. But for now, he has no plans to patent or commercialize his product.

“I’m just trying to graduate,” Klipfel said. “I wanted to do something off the wall and really cool. This ended up being that.”

Making the gloves introduced him to other interests and has inspired him to consider careers in virtual reality, robotics, web development or game development, he said.

Between now and graduation next fall, Klipfel will devote himself to the drone racing club he started at CU, hiking around Boulder and creating a video game with his brother. He’s also working on another ATLAS side project called Paper Mech, which aims to get children interested in mechanical engineering by using paper and household items to make things move.

“There’s always new stuff that I’m working on,” he said. “I know now I can complete something pretty complex from scratch.”

Photos by Patrick Campbell

All you need are Kristof Klipfel's musical gloves.

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