Most of us assume deaf people can’t register sound, let alone enjoy

Rachmaninoff. Wrong. A conceptual device from German designer Frederik

Podzuweit taps into the deaf’s ability to feel music.

Music

for Deaf People is a collar that converts auditory input into vibrations, triggering the same sound-processing brain regions in those with full hearing. So instead of listening through your ears,

you effectively listen through your skin. The collar has

a special membrane substance, which responds to electricity, dispatching the vibrations of whatever you’re

playing–be it Sinatra or Sepultura–to your neck, shoulders, and

collarbone. Adjustable, it fits snugly around your neck so you could theoretically wear it jogging or at the gym–never mind that

it looks like something straight out of a Stormtrooper’s closet. (Nerds

probably think that’s a good thing.)

To the uninitiated, it

might seem like a nonstarter, a pointless gadget resigned to the annals

of air-conditioned T-shirts

and ShamWow! Why would

deaf people want to “hear” music? The answer, of course, is for the

same reason everyone else does: Music is one of life’s enduring

pleasures.

There’s a lot of fascinating research into how

deaf people experience music. Researchers at Ryerson University designed a chair

that transmits musical vibrations along the back, turning sound into a sort of multi-sensory

cheesecake. One person described it like this: “The first time I used

the chair, I was blown away by the amount of information I could get

about music from the vibrations. For the first time in my life, I could

feel sad or happy because of how the music vibrations felt on my skin.

I never felt those kinds of feelings before when music was played.”