Simulating the effects of spread of electric excitation on musical tuning and melody identification with a cochlear implant

Document Type

Article

Abstract

PURPOSE: To determine why, in a pilot study, only 1 of 11 cochlear implant listeners was able to reliably identify a frequency-to-electrode map where the intervals of a familiar melody were played on the correct musical scale. The authors sought to validate their method and to assess the effect of pitch strength on musical scale recognition in normal-hearing listeners. METHOD: Musical notes were generated as either sine waves or spectrally shaped noise bands, with a center frequency equal to that of a desired note and symmetrical (log-scale) reduction in amplitude away from the center frequency. The rate of amplitude reduction was manipulated to vary pitch strength of the notes and to simulate different degrees of current spread. The effect of the simulated degree of current spread was assessed on tasks of musical tuning/scaling, melody recognition, and frequency discrimination. RESULTS: Normal-hearing listeners could accurately and reliably identify the appropriate musical scale when stimuli were sine waves or steeply sloping noise bands. Simulating greater current spread degraded performance on all tasks. CONCLUSIONS: Cochlear implant listeners with an auditory memory of a familiar melody could likely identify an appropriate frequency-to-electrode map but only in cases where the pitch strength of the electrically produced notes is very high.

Medical Subject Headings

Adult; Auditory Perception; Cochlear Implants; Discrimination, Psychological; Electric Stimulation (instrumentation); Female; Hearing; Humans; Male; Music; Pilot Projects; Pitch Perception; Recognition, Psychology; Sound Spectrography; Space Perception

Publication Date

12-1-2008

Publication Title

Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR

ISSN

1092-4388

Volume

51

Issue

6

First Page

1599

Last Page

606

PubMed ID

18664681

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1044/1092-4388(2008/07-0254)

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