Listening to Music with Cochlear Implants
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| Cochlear Americas N5 bilateral audio cable connected to the iPod. |
I have six plus years of playing clarinet, one year each for
viola, piano, and harmonica. During my
childhood up til teen years I was involved with my hometown church’s Handbell
Choir and Children’s Choir for the holiday seasons. I enjoyed music despite my hearing loss. During my early 20s, I participated in a
couple of local bar gigs with friends playing my clarinet by ear. How?
It’s all in the count, the beat, the harmonies and the melody. What was more important was knowing the
count, which was how my mother taught me.
Everything else followed.
While I am aware that each cochlear implant company have
uniquely different designs, programs and functions, this may or may not apply
to some or all of you. So bare with me
here. When I first got activated, I
waited until I could get used to basic sounds and to slowly build up my brain’s
recognition of different sounds. Music
is put together with just a simple note and builds up from there into a beautiful
song or an award winning masterpiece.
Getting your CI ear to learn the differences between sounds is vital to
learning the differences in the sounds of music. What do I mean? First, pay attention to what
sounds come to you easy. Are they in the
low frequency range which is equivalent to a Bass or are they in the
mid-frequency range where you can tell the difference in the low to mid-high
frequencies or are they in the high
frequency range? Where do you fall in term
of hearing the frequencies? Now, if the
low frequencies come easy, listen to music that has that bass sound, the deep
sounds that are low and loud. Some deep
sounds can even be soft but have that bass in it that you can still make out
what the words and still have the music playing a bit low in the
background. Choose music with minimal
background music to start off. Some
suggestions would be listening to music that have only people singing without
music, but you can hear the music in their voices. If you feel confident move up to music that
has a couple of instruments involved and listen to one that stands out to you,
over and over again until your CI ear get’s a better idea of what it’s
listening to. Another approach is to go
back to your old music that you are familiar with and have it on repeat for
about ten to fifteen minutes tops - do this without forcing yourself to listen
or else the sounds will not come to you naturally - just simply listen.
One thing many may not be aware of is when you first pick up on
the sounds of music you may strain or force yourself to really listen to it and
before you know it music doesn’t sound like music. Just noise.
Do yourself a favor, just relax and take it one step at a time. It’s like with speech, speech doesn’t come in
clear right away, but eventually it does because you were able to listen
passively and not actively all the time.
Passive listening is
listening without reaction and allowing someone to speak or sing, without
interrupting. Not doing anything else at the same time. This is when you are relaxed. Active
listening is reacting or doing
something that demonstrates you are listening and have understood. So this would be a response to what you heard
and writing down information or giving a verbal cue. The active listening takes place in many
different situations. However, do we
always respond back or do we just decide to “just listen” (passive
listening)? Most of the time, many of us
are really in a passive listening mode.
We don’t always respond but when we do pick up on something- there is a
response which means you were able to go from passively listening to active
listening without knowing it. Now with
music, it requires passive listening skills first. Just allow the music to “flow” to your ears,
allow those notes to stream through your auditory processing center of your
brain and let your brain get used it it.
So yes, it’s either training or retraining the brain to recognize music
notes and sounds before your brain can put it together. It’s just like learning to recognized speech
and environmental sounds. It’s little by
little.
Music is made up of different pitches. It is also made up with simple to complex
sounds. So understandably music can be a
bit difficult to master in terms of listening.
Now, if you don’t have the music background or training, as I mentioned
earlier start off simple and with the basics.
If that means listening to children’s music that is played simply to
music that is played at a much more complex level, then so be it, it’s a start. Without the building blocks or musical sounds
broken down it can be a challenge.
What helped me was reading the music and playing the keys on a
keyboard to hear the differences in notes.
As soon as I got the sounds down, I was able to proceed on my clarinet
to know how each note sounded and then play the song. Each instrument produce different sounds for
the same note, this is because of how the instruments are designed and put
together. One same note could have
similar pitches but they are slightly different in how they sound. But when
played at the same time it like a harmony of different instruments coming
together playing just that one note and holding it and it’s rough starting out
but then it starts to smooth out.
Harmony is a beautiful sound once you hear it. Melodies may come easy for some and for
others not so much. However, consider
this abstract below:
Cochlear implant melody recognition as a function of melody frequency range, harmonicity, and number of electrodes.
Author information
● 1School
of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, California 92697, USA.
Abstract
OBJECTIVE:
The primary goal of the present study was to determine how
cochlear implant melody recognition was affected by the frequency range of the
melodies, the harmonicity of these melodies, and the number of activated
electrodes. The secondary goal was to investigate whether melody recognition
and speech recognition were differentially affected by the limitations imposed
by cochlear implant processing.
DESIGN:
Four experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, 11
cochlear implant users used their clinical processors to recognize melodies of
complex harmonic tones with their fundamental frequencies being in the low
(104-262 Hz), middle (207-523 Hz), and high (414-1046 Hz) ranges. In the second
experiment, melody recognition with pure tones was compared to melody
recognition with complex harmonic tones in four subjects. In the third
experiment, melody recognition was measured as a function of the number of
electrodes in five subjects. In the fourth experiment, vowel and consonant
recognition were measured as a function of the number of electrodes in the same
five subjects who participated in the third experiment.
RESULTS:
Frequency range significantly affected cochlear implant melody
recognition, with higher frequency ranges producing better performance. Pure tones
produced significantly better performance than complex harmonic tones.
Increasing the number of activated electrodes did not affect performance with
low- and middle-frequency melodies but produced better performance with
high-frequency melodies. Large individual variability was observed for melody
recognition, but its source seemed to be different from the source of the large
variability observed in speech recognition.
CONCLUSION:
Contemporary cochlear implants do not adequately encode either
temporal pitch or place pitch cues. Melody recognition and speech recognition
require different signal processing strategies in future cochlear
implants. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19194298)
As you can see research have been done on this area. Here is another abstract taken from the same
website regarding the effect of age.
Effects of age on melody and timbre perception in simulations of electro-acoustic and cochlear-implant hearing.
Author information
● 1Department
of Speech, Language, Hearing Sciences, University of Colorado; Boulder,
Colorado, USA.
Abstract
OBJECTIVES:
Recent evidence suggests that age might affect the ability of
listeners to process fundamental frequency cues in speech, and that this
difficulty might impact the ability of older listeners to use and combine
envelope and fine structure cues available in simulations of electro-acoustic
and cochlear-implant hearing. The purpose of this article is to examine whether
this difficulty extends to music. Specially, this study focuses on whether
older listeners have a decreased ability to use and combine different types of
cues in the perception of melody and timbre.
DESIGN:
A group of older listeners with normal to near-normal hearing
and a group of younger listeners with normal hearing participated in the melody
and timbre recognition tasks of the University of Washington Clinical
Assessment of Music Perception test. The recognition tasks were completed for
five different processing conditions: (1) an unprocessed condition; (2) an
eight-channel vocoding condition that simulated a traditional cochlear implant
and contained temporal envelope cues; (3) a simulation of electro-acoustic
stimulation (sEAS) that included a low-pass acoustic component and high-pass
vocoded portion, and which provided fine structure and envelope cues; (4) a
condition that included only the low-pass acoustic portion of the sEAS; and (5)
a condition that included only the high-frequency vocoded portion of the sEAS
stimulus.
RESULTS:
Melody recognition was excellent for both younger and older
listeners in the conditions containing the unprocessed stimuli, the full sEAS
stimuli, and the low-pass sEAS stimuli. Melody recognition was significantly
worse in the cochlear-implant simulation condition, especially for the older
group of listeners. Performance on the timbre task was highest for the
unprocessed condition, and progressively decreased for the sEAS and
cochlear-implant simulation conditions. Compared with younger listeners, older
listeners had significantly poorer timbre recognition for all processing
conditions. For melody recognition, the unprocessed low-frequency portion of
the sEAS stimulus was the primary factor determining improved performance in
the sEAS condition compared with the cochlear-implant simulation. For timbre
recognition, both the unprocessed low-frequency and high-frequency vocoded
portions of the sEAS stimulus contributed to sEAS improvement in the younger
group. In contrast, most listeners in the older group were not able to take
advantage of the high-frequency vocoded portion of the sEAS stimulus for timbre
recognition.
CONCLUSIONS:
The results of this simulation study support the idea that
older listeners will have diminished timbre and melody perception in
traditional cochlear-implant listening due to degraded envelope processing. The
findings also suggest that music perception by older listeners with cochlear
implants will be improved with the addition of low-frequency residual hearing.
However, these improvements might not be comparable for all dimensions of music
perception. That is, more improvement might be evident for tasks that rely
primarily on the low-frequency portion of the electro-acoustic stimulus (e.g.,
melody recognition), and less improvement might be evident in situations that
require across-frequency integration of cues (e.g., timbre perception). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24441739
***Please note that I did copy and paste from National Center for Biotechnology Information. If you wish to learn more please feel free to click on the link to follow up. I am only going off my own experience and interpretation of information I have either read or heard about. If you wish to correct something I said please feel free to contact me. Thank you for reading.***
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