Comparison of independent, participant-led, high-resolution studies of pitch-matching in post-lingual single-sided cochlear implant recipients

Abstract

Understanding “what the world sounds like to someone else“ is fundamental to developing technologies and therapies to improve auditory perception for people with hearing impairment. Post-lingual single-sided deaf (SSD) cochlear implant (CI) recipients can play a special role here through their ability to compare perceptions of sounds heard acoustically and “electrically.” Pitch is, ostensibly, a sonic attribute that can be quantitatively compared, and pitch perception has been studied by asking SSD CI recipients to rank or discriminate limited sets of pitches, mindful of the burden on experimental participants. Through unusual circumstances, we have independently conceived and conducted two sets of participant-driven pitch-matching experiments on authors WM and DL gaining more data and richer insights than reported elsewhere. While our findings are consistent with existing lower-resolution studies (e.g., sounds perceived via CI are at higher pitch than via normal hearing), we have gained much more detailed quantitative and qualitative descriptions of those perceptual differences. Results can be meaningfully compared after accounting for individual differences and suggest that the CI transformation of pitch information for these two recipients could be individually adjusted to improve music appreciation, particularly with respect to restoring perception of musical intervals between successive notes.