Music appreciation on cochlear implant simulation with contour and temporal cues

Abstract

The musical appreciation of the cochlear implant simulation user on the contour and temporal cues and the effect of the coding strategy are determined. Cochlear implant simulations were processed using continuous interleaved sampling (CIS) and spectral peak (SPEAK) coding strategies with varying numbers of channels. The experiments consist of contour identification, temporal cue discrimination, and familiar melody identification. The results show cochlear implant simulation users are poor at recognizing contour cues compared with normal hearing, but good at discriminating temporal cues from tempo and rhythm varied with contour, achieving scores close to normal hearing. A poor score was observed in familiar melody identification with pitch contour, compared to normal hearing scores, which correlated (r = 0.99) with the recognition of contour cues. Temporal cue information from rhythm helped cochlear implant simulation users recognize familiar melodies with an almost 40% increase in score compared to melodies without rhythm (p 0.05). Music appreciation was poor on the variation of coding strategy with the number of channels 2 to 6 CIS and good on the SPEAK coding strategy (compared with 22 channels condition). The studies emphasize the need for advances in coding strategies to deliver pitch contour cues to cochlear implant processing.