Participation of Acoustic and Electric Hearing in Perceiving Musical Sounds

Abstract

Introduction: The objective of our study was to evaluate musical perception and its relation to the quality of life in patients with bimodal binaural auditory stimulation.Materials and Methods: Nineteen adult patients with a cochlear implant (CI) for minimum 6 months, and moderate to severe contralateral hearing loss with a hearing aid (HA), and 21 normal hearing adults were included in this prospective, cross-sectional study. Pure-tone and speech audiometry, musical test evaluating sound perception characteristics and musical listening abilities, Munich questionnaire for musical habits, and the APHAB questionnaire were recoded. Performance in musical perception test with HA, CI, and HA + CI, and potential correlations between music test, audiometry and questionnaires were investigated.Results: Bimodal stimulation improved musical perception in several features (sound brightness, roughness, and clarity) in comparison to unimodal hearing, but CI did not add to HA performances in texture, polyphony or musical emotion and even appeared to interfere negatively in pitch perception with HA. Musical perception performances (sound clarity, instrument recognition) appeared to be correlated to hearing-related quality of life (APHAB RV and EC subdomains) but not with speech performances suggesting that the exploration of musical perception complements speech understanding evaluation to better describe every-day life hearing handicap.Conclusion: Testing musical sound perception provides important information on hearing performances as a complement to speech audiometry and appears to be related to hearing-related quality of life.

CONTRALATERAL HEARING AID USE IN ADULT COCHLEAR IMPLANT RECIPIENTS: Retrospective analysis of auditory outcomes

“…Speech recognition in noise (Kelsall, Lupo, and Biever 2021) and segregation of competing voices (Kong, Stickney, and Zeng 2005) are also improved. Similar benefits are found with music perception (Duret et al 2021), including the components of pitch (Zhou, Gu, and Liu 2021), timbre (Kong, Mullangi, and Marozeau 2012), and melody (Zhou, Gu, and Liu 2021). Binaural use also shows improvement in daily life listening situations (Devocht et al 2020) and social activities (Farinetti et al 2015).…”