Neat! I've never bothered to go to these websites before.

Although I should point out that most people today who have cochlear implants have 22 or 24 channels, not one. I have 22 channels in one ear and 24 in the other. (You have to click through to get to these channels though).

As I mentioned before, I never really developed appreciation for music. It's probably a result of never really hearing music as it should be heard. Oh well.

I don't know about profoundly disturbing myself, but the 4-channel sample sure does sound odd, almost creepy. but what I thought was neat-o was that at 22 channels, it was a pretty decent approximation of how Alan Alda "normally" sounds.

Really? Interesting. All these years, I've been wondering "what in the hell do hearing people HEAR?" Good to know that perhaps my hearing is not as drastically different from others as I feared.

Let me try to describe the difference between 24 channel implants vs typical human hearing (as seen in recordings):

You can tell what many people are saying very close to as well as normal hearing says, at least in English. The experience is comparable to a particularly static filled radio connection.

I imagine languages such as chinese would be considerably more difficult, as you miss a lot of the "tone" of the voice, as well as the movement up or down (which they rely heavily on). I imagine it's sometimes hard to tell if people are asking a question or not from inflection alone compared to typical hearing.

Music does sound completely different in an implant (remember, I don't have one, I've just heard recordings), especially classical symphonic music as used for emotive sections of TV shows/movies, or to manage viewer tension. Pop music seems to come across rhythm wise, but you often are missing some of that same tonality above, and so I'm not sure you'd get the same tension/release cycle that's key to enjoying music in the way many typical hearing people do. I say this especially as you will not hear much of the discordant resolving that's so key to the experience.

Learning what pitches your channels are set at could possibly allow you to find particular works which allow you to experience this, but you'd have to talk to a music theory geek to really go further with this line of talk.