Video: Adorable reaction as profoundly deaf one-year-old from Ealing hears sound for the first time

By Luke Hanrahan: ITV London reporter

Like almost all newborn babies in the UK, Maxime Foussadier was given an NHS hearing test at birth.

A programme that picks up the one or two in every 1,000 British children who are born deaf.

For his parents, Giulia and Julien, it was heart-breaking.

Their son, born into a multilingual family had inherited congenital hearing loss.

Giulia, who is Italian, and Julien, who is French, had anticipated their son would grow up to speak three languages.

The diagnosis was a bombshell:

Today their son heard for the first time:

Maxime was born without a functioning cochlear, but as his parents discovered, there is a procedure with an extremely high success rate that could allow their son to hear.

Cochlear implant surgery isn't a cure for deafness, but will help Max to experience sound - to learn to speak.

A cochlear implant is a device made up of parts that uses small electrical currents to stimulate the hearing nerve, which then sends signals to the brain which are interpreted as sound.

The first part consists of a receiver and stimulator, which is implanted under the skin behind the ear.

The other is made up of a microphone, a sound processor and a transmitter that is placed externally over the receiver, held in place magnetically.

To create sound, the microphone picks up and amplifies noises that the sound processor then filters, giving priority to audible speech.

The processor sends electrical signals to the transmitter, which in turn sends the processed sound signals to the internal receiver electromagnetically.

Maxime today became the 1,000th child at Great Ormond Street hospital to benefit from this revolutionary four-hour surgical procedure.

The components used may have got smaller, but the technology has changed very little since operations began in the early 1990s.

The biggest change is the age at which operations now take place.

Children born deaf who receive cochlear implants before the age of two do considerably better with spoken language than those who receive implants at a later age.