Rich Lee was a mild-mannered salesman from St. George, Utah until one day he was bio-hacked to have headphones installed into his head, thus increasing his ailing vision with the sonar power of a bat while enjoying his own soundtrack through the power of magnets.
It might sound like the crazy origin story of a comic book superhero (perhaps a scrapped version of Daredevil?), but its all true, with 34-year-old Rich Lee becoming the first human to have headphones surgically implanted into his earbuds, as The Guardian reports.
Lee is a self-described “grinder”, a group that believes in the enhancement of the human body through technological modification – or ‘biohacking’. The Utah resident’s surgical procedure was carried out by “the godfather of body modification,” Steve Haworth, who has been experimenting with biohacking since 1998.
The 34-year-old salesman had Haworth implant magnets into his tragus (the flap of the ear that hangs over the ear opening), which act as invisible headphones, picking up frequencies from a copper coil necklace which transmits music played through a standard quarter-inch jack-equipped device, such as an iPod – as Lee explains in his how-to video.
While it may raise a lot of questions (can he go swimming? What happens when he goes through airport security?), the chief one audiophiles interested in surgically implanted headphones want answered is ‘what is the sound quality like?’ Brace for disappointment.
“The sound quality is decent, maybe comparable to a cheap set of earbuds,” Lee explains to PopSci. “It exceeded my expectations. I would have been happy with a muffled hum, since listening to music was not my primary motivation.”
Blasting his favourite tunes directly into his head is a nice side-effect to Lee’s primary purpose for the new body-mod; he is beginning to lose vision in his right eye and doctors have warned that his left eye could soon suffer too. But with a cornea transplant being “a bit out of my budget at the moment,” says Lee, he plans to broadcast his new (literal) earphones to an ultrasonic rangefinder, essentially giving him echolocation – like a bat or dolphin’s sonar.
“I figure learning to navigate with echolocation is a good thing to develop now. Not that I’ve resigned myself to blindness or anything,” he adds.
That’s not all, he also tells Techno Buffalo he could also broadcast his magnetic earbuds to wireless mics for a little homemade espionage. “I plan to hook it up to a directional mic of some sort (possibly disguised as a shirt button or something) so I can hear conversations across a room,” says Lee.
It’s all part of the grinder ethos of self-enhancement, who refuses to be “caged by [his] DNA” as he tells The Guardian. “If I see a way to eliminate the need for sleep I will never sleep again. If I can have x-ray vision through some cybernetic technology I will have it, even if it requires an ocular prosthetic that leaves me looking like a monster,” he says.
“If I discover a gene therapy that will give me super strength, I will augment my very DNA to do so,” he says. “I do not abide by the restraints imposed by ethics committees who attempt to regulate human enhancement. Their arguments will be obsolete 10 years from now.”
