Enhancing music perception in cochlear implant users by providing missing sound-information through tactile stimulation

Fletcher, Mark (2021) Enhancing music perception in cochlear implant users by providing missing sound-information through tactile stimulation. In 3rd Music & Cochlear Implants Symposium.

Abstract

Cochlear implants (CIs) are remarkably effective at restoring hearing in severely-to-profoundly hearing-impaired individuals. However, users often struggle to deconstruct complex auditory scenes, which can lead to reduced music enjoyment and impaired speech understanding in background noise. Several recent studies have shown that haptic stimulation can enhance CI listening by giving access to sound features that are poorly transmitted through the electrical CI signal. This “electro-haptic stimulation” improves melody recognition and pitch discrimination, as well as speech-in-noise performance and sound localization. This talk will discuss the current evidence that haptic stimulation can enhance music perception in hearing-impaired listeners. This will include an assessment of the evidence of enhanced music enjoyment by current haptic devices and a discussion of which key sound features can be effectively transmitted through haptic stimulation. Finally, ongoing and future work in this area will be discussed, including new haptic devices and signal-processing strategies. It will be argued that there is huge potential for haptic devices to enhance music perception in CI users.

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