A cochlear implant user with exceptional musical hearing ability

Abstract

Although the perception of music is generally poor in cochlear implant users, there are a few excellent performers. Objective: The aim of this study was the assessment of different aspects of music perception in one exceptional cochlear implant user. Design: The assessments included pitch direction discrimination, melody and timbre recognition, relative and absolute pitch judgment, and consonance rating of musical notes presented through the sound processor(s). Study sample: An adult cochlear implant user with musical background who lost her hearing postlingually, and five normally-hearing listeners with musical training participated in the study. Results: The CI user discriminated pitch direction for sounds differing by one semitone and recognized melody with nearly 100% accuracy. Her results in timbre recognition were better than average published data for cochlear implant users. Her consonance rating, and relative and absolute pitch perception were comparable to normally-hearing listeners with musical training. Conclusion: The results in this study showed that excellent performance is possible on musical perception tasks including pitch perception using present day cochlear implant technologies. Factors that may explain this user's exceptional performance are short duration of deafness, pre- and post-deafness musical training, and perfect pitch abilities before the onset of deafness.

Key Words::

• Pitch direction discrimination
• melody recognition
• timbre recognition
• absolute pitch
• relative pitch
• consonance rating
• cochlear implant
• music perception

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank SP for her time and enthusiasm in participating in all the experiments, Marie Camilleri for her help in the melody segregation data collection, and Hamish Innes-Brown and Julia Sarant for their useful comments throughout the study. The Bionics Institute acknowledges the support it receives from the Victorian Government through its Operational Infrastructural Support Program. The study was conducted with approval of the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital Human Research and Ethics Committee, Project 10/955H, Improving melody segregation in cochlear implant recipients and hearing aid users. Some parts of this paper were presented in the Conference on Implantable Auditory Prostheses, San Francisco, USA.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflict of interest in this study.

Financial support was provided by the Iran Ministry of Health and Medical education and NHMRC project grant 100882.