Music perception ability of korean adult cochlear implant listeners

Although the cochlear implant (CI) is successful for understanding speech in patients with severe to profound hearing loss, listening to music is a challenging task to most CI listeners. The purpose of this study was to assess music perception ability and to provide clinically useful information regarding CI rehabilitation.

Ten normal hearing and ten CI listeners with implant experience, ranging 2 to 6 years, participated in the subtests of pitch, rhythm, melody, and instrument. A synthesized piano tone was used as musical stimuli. Participants were asked to discriminate two different tones during the pitch subtest. The rhythm subtest was constructed with sets of five, six, and seven intervals. The melody & instrument subtests assessed recognition of eight familiar melodies and five musical instruments from a closed set, respectively.

CI listeners performed significantly poorer than normal hearing listeners in pitch, melody, and instrument identification tasks. No significant differences were observed in rhythm recognition between groups. Correlations were not found between music perception ability and word recognition scores.

The results are consistent with previous studies that have shown that pitch, melody, and instrument identifications are difficult to identify for CI users. Our results can provide fundamental information concerning the development of CI rehabilitation tools.