Music with Cochlear Implants

A cochlear implant (CI) can give deaf people back the ability to understand speech remarkably well. Music, however, is much harder: it demands the most of the implant’s technology and of the listener’s central auditory processing. Many CI users find that chords, timbre and melodies sound flat or confusing. Can music be learned again – and does training with music also help understanding speech?

In a joint project with the Department of Otorhinolaryngology of the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein (UKSH), Campus Lübeck – led by Dr. med. Daniela Hollfelder, head of the day clinic and implant consultation – and the Institute of Acoustics of the Technische Hochschule Lübeck, we studied music perception of CI users. The study was funded by the implant manufacturer MED-EL (Innsbruck).

The study

23 patients with MED-EL implants were randomly divided into two groups: one group trained with the music learning app “Meludia”, the other did not train. Most of them were bimodal (an implant on one ear, a hearing aid on the other), some were single-sided deaf or had implants on both ears. 22 normal-hearing listeners served as a control group. Music was streamed wirelessly directly into the patients’ own implants. In several follow-up sessions, we tested:

  • preference for and discrimination of chords
  • recognition of the fitting final chord of a cadence
  • rhythm recognition
  • discrimination of timbre
  • speech understanding in quiet and in noise

Results

At the start, both groups did not differ in chord discrimination, cadence and rhythm recognition. After training, the Meludia group came closer to the normal-hearing listeners in chord preference, timbre and rhythm recognition than the group without training. Speech understanding in quiet (Freiburg monosyllables) improved significantly in the training group, from 61 % to 81 % words understood, while the improvement in the group without training was not significant. In noise, neither group improved.

Overall, the results point to positive effects of music training on both music perception and speech understanding. The amount of training time differed strongly between participants. Those who trained a lot reported a clearly better enjoyment of music in everyday life and a real gain in quality of life.

See also Cochlear Model.

Literature

Hollfelder, D., Berges, S., Schmidt, J., Jürgens, T., Bader, R. & Bruchhage, K.-L.: Musikwahrnehmung von Cochlea-Implantat-Trägern mit und ohne musikalisches Training. Abstract, DAGA 2024, Hannover.