Cochlear implant users experience the sound-to-music effect

The speech-to-song illusion is a robust effect where repeated speech induces the perception of singing; this effect has been extended to repeated excerpts of environmental sounds (sound-to-music effect). Here we asked whether repetition could elicit musical percepts in cochlear implant (CI) users, who experience challenges with perceiving music due to both physiological and device limitations.

Thirty adult CI users and thirty age-matched controls with normal hearing (NH) completed two repetition experiments for speech and nonspeech sounds (water droplets). We hypothesized that CI users would experience the sound-to-music effect from temporal/rhythmic cues alone, but to a lesser magnitude compared to NH controls, given the limited access to spectral information CI users receive from their implants.

We found that CI users did experience the sound-to-music effect but to a lesser degree compared to NH participants. Musicality ratings were not associated with musical training or frequency resolution, and among CI users, clinical variables like duration of hearing loss also did not influence ratings.

Cochlear implants provide a strong clinical model for disentangling the effects of spectral and temporal information in an acoustic signal; our results suggest that temporal cues are sufficient to perceive the sound-to-music effect when spectral resolution is limited. Additionally, incorporating short repetitions into music specially designed for CI users may provide a promising way for them to experience music.