Have any of you seen the game show from a looong time ago called Name that Tune?  The format of the show consisted of a pair of contestants who challenged each other to name tunes with a fewer number of notes than the other one.  I remember being awed that on occasion someone would be able to correctly name the song with only one note (without words)!  Well I was reminded of this game show while I was listening to songs in the shuffle mode while jumping on my mini trampoline when I knew after one note what one of the songs was.  That song was Hey Jude sung by the Beatles (of course).  I did have the benefit of hearing the first word with the note—I would have never guessed it without hearing the word with the note, but hey, I thought it was kind of cool to be able to recognize a song that quickly!

Actually, out of my 700+ (and growing) songs downloaded to my Zune (Microsoft version of the iPod), I can sometimes recognize the exact song after say several notes.  That’s pretty rare though.  More likely (only sometimes) I will know at least who the artist is even before the words have started.  It’s neat that I can sometimes recognize patterns and rhythms of notes from different artists/songs.  Over the past two weeks I have been listening to a larger variety of singers/bands thanks to the Zune Marketplace with their song samples and Pandora.com.  From that I pick out my favorites and buy their CDs (most of them used) online.  I’ve already started getting them in the mail and downloading them into my Zune.  So now you know how I’m spending my Christmas money—thanks Mom and Dad!

I’m wearing my cochlear implant whenever I’m wearing my hearing aid and am very happy to have that privilege.  By the way, when listening to music, I much prefer to wear both.  If you measure my progress by how well I understand speech with my CI alone, then my progress would be considered very slow.  Only twice can I remember understanding something without looking when wearing my CI alone.  Both of those phrases came from Simon, and one of the phrases was, “May I have some chocolate?”  The other phrase was “not right now” when I asked Simon to do something while he was playing a video game.  Both of those phrases sounded very clear to me, but both must have been a fluke.  I have been continuing to listen to books on tape with my CI alone along with the book.  The reality is though that most of the time I also wear my hearing aid, so haven’t given my CI much of a chance to work alone.  But when I consider that I've gone all these years hearing nothing with my left ear and now can distinguish among environmental sounds with just my left ear, I've come a long way that I've never dreamed possible.