Introduction
Recognition of Western music demands high spectral resolution to process pitch cues accurately,1 but speech sound can be recognized with coarse spectral resolution as long as high temporal resolution is guaranteed.2 With excellent temporal resolution, cochlear implants (CIs) have been generally successful in enabling users with severe sensorineuronal hearing impairment to attain good speech perception and production.3 Processing music, on the other hand, had been considered to be far more challenging than speech because of relatively coarse resolution CIs provide. Research on music processing with CIs not only reports levels of perception and production acuity, but also started to reveal benefits of music for users of CIs.
Rhythm processing
Along with pitch processing, rhythm processing is fundamental to music perception and production. CI users can perceive rhythmic patterns at an equivalent level of normally hearing adults.4–6 Child CI users can reproduce temporal patterning in their sung renditions as accurately as hearing children can.7
Pitch processing and music recognition
To judge the direction of pitch change, CI users typically require four semitones or more,8,9 but the threshold is lower for child CI users when the task is simpler. When required to detect a pitch change in the context of a repeating tone, child CI users can detect change at one semitone.10
Melody recognition requires processing of both elementary pitch discrimination and pitch contour. Implanted adults and children seem unable to identify melodies from pitch cues alone.8,11 In one study, child CI users also showed difficulty in reproducing pitch patterning in their sung renditions.7 Pitch range was compressed to one third of the range compared to hearing children (means were 76.58 Hz for child CI users and 238.83 Hz for hearing children) and reproduction of directional changes in pitch was at chance levels and significantly lower than hearing children (means were .48 for child CI users and .96 for hearing children).
Enjoyment of music with CI
Despite having difficulty perceiving pitch accurately, most child implant users recognize familiar tunes and enjoy them. From incidental exposure to theme songs of TV programs (anime), child CI users can identify songs in the original commercial recordings (vocal plus instrumental), but not in the instrumental version (identical to the original except for the absence of vocals), nor in the melody-only version.12 Parents responded to questionnaires on the childrens’ music habit. Out of 17 children, all but one child sang at home, but only nine listened to music as a distinct activity. Most of the children who reported to sing, did so dancing and/ or smiling. When tested with pop songs, child and teen CI users identified songs in instrumental version as well as the original version.10 The children in the two studies gave favorable appraisals of the music even if they were unable to recognize it. Some child CI users may not be appreciating melodic features of music, but they are certainly enjoying rich spectral and rhythmic features of music. In many parts of the world, rhythm plays an central role (e.g., Indian classical music, African drumming). Rhythm actually plays a critical role for young infants when processing music.13,14
Exposure to music and enhanced music processing
Processing of spectral information in music is challenging to CI users, but they show improved performance after exposure to music for an extended period of time. CI users showed improved on timbre recognition task after participating in 12-week training on PC designed for enhancing sensitivity to timber perception.15 Three teens with implants who participated in the Nakata et al. study7 agreed to sing six years after their first recordings. Two had taken music lessons at the time of testing (seven and six years of age) and continued for multiple years. The two teens reproduction of directional change in pitch improved tremendously (89% from 69% and 70% from 52%).
Speech prosody as a bridge for gaining music perception and production
Low group performance on pitch perception and production do not mean that CI users are having the same level of difficulty with speech prosody as they do with music. Recent findings on speech prosody processing show CI children can perceive pitch sweep better than expected by previous reports using pitch change detection.16
When uttered with positive emotion, features of speech to infants and others with emotional ties are rich in prosodic features that resemble music, such as slow tempo, higher pitch, repetitive and simple pitch con-tour.17,18 Infants like to listen to voice with rich prosodic features uttered with positive emotion.19 Interestingly, six-month-olds prefer audio-visual recordings of their mother’s singing over speaking to them.20
CI children show benefit of ‘musical’ features in spoken sentences when identifying the talker. Mothers’ speech to both NH and CI infants21,22 is a typical infant-directed speech which is rich in prosodic features. Until recently, talker identification was considered to be difficult with cochlear implants when speakers are the same gender,23 but Vongpaisal and coworkers24 found that child CI users can identify their mother’s prosodically rich voice from other speakers, including similar age stranger women’s voices. Child CI users could identify their mother’s voice even when non-mothers mimicked their mother’s voice. Familiarity plays a role in talker identification, but also prosodically rich ‘musical’ features likely to have played an important role in talker identification with CI.
Research has started to illuminate association between language and music. Music training seems to be associated with enhanced pitch processing abilities25–27 and higher cognitive functions.28
Conclusion
Presumably because hearing individuals do not see the benefit of improving their prosodic features in speech, no study has yet examined the effect of speech prosody training for CI users. Music training and/or extended experience with prosodically rich speech may be a contributing factor common to children with CIs who performed well on pitch perception and production measures. Tremendous efforts and personal sacrifice are involved with CI users who show close to normal music perception and production skills. More research is needed to uncover factors that lead to good music perception and production with CIs.
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Address for correspondence: Takayuki Nakata, nakata@fun.ac.jp
Cholesteatoma and Ear Surgery – An Update, pp. 155–157
Edited by Haruo Takahashi
2013 © Kugler Publications, Amsterdam, The Netherlands