“For years, Musicians have been told that the ear acts as a Fourier analyzer. This quarter-truth has increased the distrust of perceptive musicians regarding scientists.”

During the Cold War, electronics engineer John K. Bates, Jr. was assigned to design a passive radar defense system possessing the ear’s abilities. However, he discovered that the Fourier-based model of the ear was not suitable for his electronic radar ears. As a result, he decided to start from scratch and developed a new model to provide his electronic ears with the necessary capabilities.

John’s model was groundbreaking as it completely disregarded tradition. Rather than using complex mathematics, he employed third-grade arithmetic. Instead of focusing on the frequency domain, which views the world through mathematical lenses, he embraced the time domain – the domain of vibrating strings, audio speakers, changing voltages, and the perception of sound by the ear.

John’s design was first classified and hidden from view; it reemerged in a time of change—electronic components containing embedded formulas replaced the discrete elements of John’s electronic radar ear’s era. John’s model was pushed aside and eventually discarded—but John didn’t forget.

Approaching retirement, John built a laboratory in his basement and began investigating acoustic uses for his radar ear. Using his electronic intelligence experience, John started extracting the building blocks of speech from sounds—phonemes—and followed that with manipulating phonic elements. He began deconstructing heavily accented speech, removing the phonics associated with accents, and reconstructing speech free of accents.

However, introducing another electronic ear, the cochlear implant, changed John’s life. The cochlear implant’s foundation was the same frequency domain ear model he had encountered decades earlier, and John knew it would contain unsolvable problems. John decided to build an alternative implant – a better implant.