Abstract
PurposeA group of 10 prelingually deafened children with cochlear implants (CIs) formed a choir and received 21 months of formal music training. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the singing proficiency of these children.MethodThe participants included all choir members (7 girls and 3 boys, mean age of 9.5 years old) who were unilateral CI users. Meanwhile, 8 age-matched children with normal hearing were recruited as controls and were trained on 1 song for 2 weeks. Individual singing samples without instrument accompaniment were recorded from all participants. The singing samples were subject to acoustic analysis in which the fundamental frequency (F0) of each note was extracted and the duration was measured. Five metrics were developed and computed to quantify the accuracy of their pitch and rhythm performance. The 5 metrics included (a) percent correct of F0 contour direction of adjacent notes, (b) mean deviation of the normalized F0 across the notes, (c) mean deviation of the pitch intervals, (d) mean deviation of adjacent note duration ratio, and (e) mean absolute deviation of note duration.ResultsThe choir members with CIs demonstrated high accuracy in both pitch and tempo measures and performed on par with the children with normal hearing. Early start of music training after implantation and use of bimodal hearing contributed to the development of better music ability in these children with CIs.ConclusionThese findings indicated that rigorous music training could facilitate high singing proficiency in prelingually deafened children with CIs.
Highlights
Music, like human language, is one of the most complicated, demanding, yet unique human activities
The two children with cochlear implants (CIs) (CI1 and CI6) were the best and the poorest performer based on the mean note deviation and mean interval deviation of the pitch contours among the CI group
As the first attempt to evaluate the effects of music training on vocal singing ability in children with CIs, this study showed that the prelingually deafened children with CIs could achieve high proficiency in vocal singing following a long-term intensive formal music training
Summary
Like human language, is one of the most complicated, demanding, yet unique human activities. Xu et al (2009) recruited seven 5- to 12-year-old prelingually deafened children with CIs and compared their singing performance with that of 14 peers with NH They developed five metrics to capture the pitch and rhythm aspects of vocal singing accuracy. Together with a later study with additional 37 prelingually deafened children with CIs, 31 children with hearing impairment with hearing aids (HAs), and 37 children with NH (Mao et al, 2013), Xu et al reported that children with hearing impairment using either CIs or HAs showed significantly poorer performance on pitch-related measures in comparison to the controls with NH These findings suggest that children with hearing impairment, regardless of being fitted with CI or HA devices, are less likely to achieve satisfactory proficiency in vocal singing. The results showed that the melodic contour identification score was generally poor
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