Engineering Music to Sound Better with Cochlear Implants

When hearing loss becomes so severe that hearing aids no longer help, a cochlear implant not only amplifies sounds but also lets people hear speech clearly.

Music is a different story.

“I’ve pretty much given up listening to music and being able to enjoy it,” says Prudence Garcia-Renart, a musician who gave up playing the piano a few years ago.

“I’ve had the implant for 15 years now and it has done so much for me. Before I got the implant, I was working but I could not use a phone, I needed somebody to take notes for me at meetings, and I couldn’t have conversations with more than one person. I can now use a phone, I recognize people’s voices, I go to films, but music is awful.”

Cochlear implants are designed to process speech, which is a much simpler auditory signal compared with music. People with severe hearing loss also have lost auditory neurons that transmit signals to the brain.

It’s not possible to tweak the settings of the implant to compensate for the loss of auditory neurons, says Anil Lalwani, MD, director of the Columbia Cochlear Implant Program. “It’s unrealistic to expect people with that kind of nerve loss to process the complexity of a symphony, even with an implant.”

Instead, Dr. Lalwani and members of Columbia’s Cochlear Implant Music Engineering Group are trying to reengineer and simplify music to be more enjoyable for listeners with cochlear implants. “You don’t necessarily need the entire piece to enjoy the music,” Dr. Lalwani says. “Even though a song may have very complex layers, you can sometimes just enjoy the vocals, or you can just enjoy the instruments.”

Labelled diagram of a cochlear implant.
It’s not possible to tweak the settings of the implant to compensate for the loss of auditory neurons. Image adapted from the Columbia Medical video.

Right now the group is testing different arrangements of musical compositions to learn which parts of the music are most important for listener enjoyment. “It’s not the same for somebody who has normal hearing,” Dr. Lalwani says, “and that’s what we have to learn.”

Down the road, Dr. Lalwani thinks software will be able to take an original piece of music and reconfigure it for listeners or give the listener the ability to engineer their own music.


Columbia’s Cochlear Implant Music Engineering Group is trying to reengineer and simplify music to be more enjoyable for listeners with cochlear implants.

“Our eventual goal, though, is to compose music for people with cochlear implants based on what we’ve learned,” Dr. Lalwani says. “Original pieces of music that will possibly have less rhythmic instruments, less reverb, possibly more vocals–something that is actually designed for them.”

About this neuroscience research

Anil K. Lalwani serves in the Medical Advisory Board of Advanced Bionics Corporation. Theauthors have no other funding, financial relationships, or conflict of interests to disclose.

Source: Lucky Tran, Ph.D. – University of Columbia Medical Center
Image Source: The image is adapted from the Columbia Medical video.
Video Source: Video is credited to Columbia Medical.
Original Research: Abstract for “Music Engineering as a Novel Strategy for Enhancing Music Enjoyment in the Cochlear Implant Recipient” by Gavriel D. Kohlberg, Dean M. Mancuso, Divya A. Chari, and Anil K. Lalwani in Behavioural Neurology. Published online February 2016 doi:10.1155/2015/829680


Abstract

Music Engineering as a Novel Strategy for Enhancing Music Enjoyment in the Cochlear Implant Recipient

Objective. Enjoyment of music remains an elusive goal following cochlear implantation. We test the hypothesis that reengineering music to reduce its complexity can enhance the listening experience for the cochlear implant (CI) listener.

Methods. Normal hearing (NH) adults () and CI listeners () evaluated a piece of country music on three enjoyment modalities: pleasantness, musicality, and naturalness. Participants listened to the original version along with 20 modified, less complex, versions created by including subsets of the musical instruments from the original song. NH participants listened to the segments both with and without CI simulation processing.

Results. Compared to the original song, modified versions containing only 1–3 instruments were less enjoyable to the NH listeners but more enjoyable to the CI listeners and the NH listeners with CI simulation. Excluding vocals and including rhythmic instruments improved enjoyment for NH listeners with CI simulation but made no difference for CI listeners.

Conclusions. Reengineering a piece of music to reduce its complexity has the potential to enhance music enjoyment for the cochlear implantee. Thus, in addition to improvements in software and hardware, engineering music specifically for the CI listener may be an alternative means to enhance their listening experience.

“Music Engineering as a Novel Strategy for Enhancing Music Enjoyment in the Cochlear Implant Recipient” by Gavriel D. Kohlberg, Dean M. Mancuso, Divya A. Chari, and Anil K. Lalwani in Behavioural Neurology. Published online February 2016 doi:10.1155/2015/829680

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