The MuSIC perception test: A novel battery for testing music perception of cochlear implant users

Abstract

This study was undertaken to evaluate the musical sounds in cochlear implants (MuSIC) perception test, created to assess the music-listening abilities of cochlear implant (CI) users. Thirty-one unilateral MED-EL COMBI 40+/PULSARCI(100) users and a control group of 67 adults with normal hearing (NH) participated. The MuSIC test comprises six objective and two subjective modules employing approximately 2800 musical files recorded from non-synthesized instruments. A subset was used for comparing CI and NH participants' results. CI and NH participants performed significantly differently on: pitch discrimination, melody discrimination, chord discrimination, instrument detection, and instrument identification. No significant difference in performance was seen on the subtests of rhythm discrimination or dissonance rating and emotion rating. The MuSIC test was found to be a valuable tool for assessing music perception in CI users and NH participants, whether investigating one aspect of music perception in depth or conducting a broad survey of music perception.

Children with bilateral cochlear implants identify emotion in speech and music

“…Given the musical pitch processing difficulties of CI users (Brockmeier et al, 2011;Cooper et al, 2008;McDermott, 2004), it is not surprising that they are unable to discriminate major from minor melodic patterns (Vongpaisal et al, 2006). Although CI users can resolve timing differences and they use such differences in music-recognition tasks (Hsiao, 2008;Kong et al, 2004;Stordahl, 2002), it is unclear when child CI users first link those and other acoustic cues with musical emotions.…”

“…Although the stimuli had tempo, mode, and other cues to emotion, the authors speculated that CI users based their judgments primarily on tempo. When timing cues are available, adult CI users distinguish happy from sad musical excerpts, as do their NH counterparts (Brockmeier et al, 2011).…”

A Music-Related Quality of Life Measure to Guide Music Rehabilitation for Adult Cochlear Implant Users

“…It was hypothesised that the MuRQoL frequency scores of NH adults would be significantly higher than those of CI users for the overall scale and subscales. This hypothesis was based on the evidence in the literature for significantly worse performance of adult CI users compared to NH adults in the perception of pitch, timbre and in the recognition of familiar melodies, as measured with music perception tests (Kang et al, 2009;Looi et al, 2008;Brockmeier et al, 2011). Significantly poorer scores for self-reported music enjoyment and music listening habits have also been reported for CI users (Veekmans et al, 2009).…”

Melody and chord discrimination of cochlear implant users in different pitch ranges

“…The present study uses the Mu.S.I.C. perception test (Fitzgerald et al, 2006;Brockmeier et al, 2011) that provides a corpus of short musical excerpts recorded from natural instruments. It is, therefore, closer to the situation of listening to a concert than the synthesized sounds used in other tests.…”