Abstract
Prelingually deaf children listening through cochlear implants (CIs) face severe limitations on their experience of music, since the hearing device degrades relevant details of the acoustic input. An important parameter of music is harmony, which conveys emotional as well as syntactic information. The present study addresses musical harmony in three psychoacoustic experiments in young, prelingually deaf CI listeners and normal-hearing (NH) peers. The discrimination and preference of typical musical chords were studied, as well as cadence sequences conveying musical syntax. The ability to discriminate chords depended on the hearing age of the CI listeners, and was less accurate than for the NH peers. The groups did not differ with respect to the preference of certain chord types. NH listeners were able to categorize cadences, and performance improved with age at testing. In contrast, CI listeners were largely unable to categorize cadences. This dissociation is in accordance with data found in postlingually deafened adults. Consequently, while musical harmony is available to a limited degree to CI listeners, they are unable to use harmony to interpret musical syntax.
Highlights
For young humans, music represents a beneficial factor in language, social, creative development, and plays a role in adolescents’ mood regulation (Saarikallio and Erkkilä, 2007)
VZ, MB-B, and JV contributed to the conception and design of the study and performed the data analysis
MZ helped with choice of potential listeners and provided the fitting of the cochlear implant (CI) processors of the listeners
Summary
Music represents a beneficial factor in language, social, creative development (see Hallam, 2010), and plays a role in adolescents’ mood regulation (Saarikallio and Erkkilä, 2007). Cochlear implant (CI) users face substantial degradations of sound details, many of them enjoy listening to music, and its contribution to their quality of life has been reported repeatedly (Leal et al, 2003; Lassaletta et al, 2007). This was mainly studied in adults but a positive attitude toward music may be regarded as an important objective for young prelingually deaf who acquire their musical experience via the CI only. CI listeners perceive pitch less accurately than normal-hearing (NH) listeners (Pretorius and Hanekom, 2008; Kang et al, 2009), as well as other spectral parameters in music, such as melody contour (Galvin et al, 2009) and instrument timbre (Kang et al, 2009; Brockmeier et al, 2011). Roy et al (2014) found similar results in CI children, who exhibited difficulty in discriminating pitch and timbre, but less so for discriminating chord sequences
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