Music is a common part of cultural rituals, social events, and is valued for its artistic and emotional expression. Following speech perception, music appreciation is the next most commonly expressed desire of implant recipients. However, current devices and coding strategies have been designed with speech perception in mind. Implant recipients commonly describe the sound of music through current implants as unnatural or unpleasant in quality, and find tasks requiring good pitch perception (e.g., song recognition) very difficult. Given attainment of reasonable transmission of speech sounds in current devices, and the emergence of advanced processing strategies, musical enjoyment seems a logical objective with regard to implant benefit, and one can argue is a more stringent test than speech of implant design. In collaboration with Audiology and Electrophysiology, we will investigate several novel signal processing schemes to determine if music perception and appreciation can be enhanced. We will also examine the relations among psychophysical, psychological, and speech perception measures, and perception of complex musical sounds. Past research indicates that systematic training can improve some aspects of music appreciation, even for implant recipients who use current speech processors. We will examine the effect of systematic training versus long term use for implant recipients who use conventional speech processing strategies as well as novel signal processing that has been optimized for music listening. Because we have a large group of implanted children who are long-term users, we can follow changes in music perception and appreciation that occur as a result of experience with the device, and examine the impact of audiological history (e.g., age of implantation). In collaboration with the Language Project, we will compare how music perception of prelingually deafened children, who are now approaching young adulthood, compares with that of postingually deafened adults. We will also cooperate with the Language Project to follow changes in auditory perception (using music as a nonlinguistic stimulus) in infants, young children who use cochlear implants, and a comparison group of children who use conventional hearing aids.
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