CI Music Perception

Dear list,

Hello, I am a new member. A colleague pointed out this list to me since I am a CI user as well as a research scientist interested in CI psychoacoustics. I thouroughly enjoy listening to and playing music. I play drums and keyboard. I lost my hearing suddenly to meningitis at 12 and was implanted at 13. As a child, I did not have a good sense of harmony, nor could I sing in tune, but I began playing drums around the age of 11. I am now in an amateur band and listen to several hours of music every day. Preferences tend towards rhythmic pieces such as Indian music (I also play tablas) and bluegrass (love the finger-picking), but I my interests vary.

The greatest deficit that I have noticed is that I don't feel a strong percept associated with chords. I do experience a weak percept allowing me to classify a strong harmonic diad such as tonic and fifth, or tonic and octave, versus tonic and major 7th. But in a controlled study, I think I would fail to classify majors versus minors.

A couple comments related to previous threads. First, I think I know a CI user who can sing in tune. I've always felt that I was one of the stars of the implant world, but this guy is phenomenal and is more of a professional musician than me (i.e. he gets paid gigs). He is a keyboardist, but is trained so well, that I wouldn't be surprised if he can match his voice.

Second, and this is huge. Please do not think that the CI simulations currently used are accurate is transmitting the percept of sound. At best, they are accurate indicators of the information content transmitted by a generic CI sound processing strategy. The moment you use either a noise carrier or sinusoids or even band-limited impulse trains, you are producing a percept that is fundamentally different from what music sounds like to me. As a musician dances upwards in a scale, the individual notes produce distinct electrode amplitude patterns that in turn produce a percept (hopefully ptich matched). But for a NH listening to a CI simulation, two adjacent bands being bombarded with band-limited noise carriers is not going to produce the same percept at all. To begin with, using noise carriers will introduce temporal fluctuations in the envelope signal that is distinctly interpreted as noise. I could go on, but I feel I am going to fast to make a cohesive statement, so will stop.

I hope these comments prove interesting since they are my introduction to the list....

Ray