Abstract
Introduction: The objective of our study was to evaluate musical perception and its relation to the quality of life in patients with bimodal binaural auditory stimulation.Materials and Methods: Nineteen adult patients with a cochlear implant (CI) for minimum 6 months, and moderate to severe contralateral hearing loss with a hearing aid (HA), and 21 normal hearing adults were included in this prospective, cross-sectional study. Pure-tone and speech audiometry, musical test evaluating sound perception characteristics and musical listening abilities, Munich questionnaire for musical habits, and the APHAB questionnaire were recoded. Performance in musical perception test with HA, CI, and HA + CI, and potential correlations between music test, audiometry and questionnaires were investigated.Results: Bimodal stimulation improved musical perception in several features (sound brightness, roughness, and clarity) in comparison to unimodal hearing, but CI did not add to HA performances in texture, polyphony or musical emotion and even appeared to interfere negatively in pitch perception with HA. Musical perception performances (sound clarity, instrument recognition) appeared to be correlated to hearing-related quality of life (APHAB RV and EC subdomains) but not with speech performances suggesting that the exploration of musical perception complements speech understanding evaluation to better describe every-day life hearing handicap.Conclusion: Testing musical sound perception provides important information on hearing performances as a complement to speech audiometry and appears to be related to hearing-related quality of life.
Highlights
The objective of our study was to evaluate musical perception and its relation to the quality of life in patients with bimodal binaural auditory stimulation
The PTA without and with the hearing aid (HA) were measured at 76 ± 5.3 dB and 45 ± 3.7 dB respectively (Figure 1)
We developed a musical test battery which explored musical perception capabilities at several levels ranging from sound characteristics to evoked musical emotions
Summary
The objective of our study was to evaluate musical perception and its relation to the quality of life in patients with bimodal binaural auditory stimulation. This situation does not restitute stereophony, several studies have shown that patients combine electrical stimulation with contralateral acoustic amplification to enjoy binaural functions to some extent (Morera et al, 2005; Ching et al, 2007; Firszt et al, 2012; Illg et al, 2014; Van Loon et al, 2017; Vroegop et al, 2018) These studies report an improvement in the perception of speech in both silent and noisy contexts together with improved sound quality and music perception (Kong et al, 2005). Coding the temporal fine structure in CI by delivering the fluctuations of the electrical signal to the cochlea provides both temporal and spatial information It increases speech perception in background noise and timbre recognition (Todd et al, 2019). This type of coding algorithm would require large number of functional channels and a very rapid rate of stimulation, creating again undesired channel interaction
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