Making Music More Accessible for Cochlear Implant Listeners: Recent Developments

Cochlear implants (CIs) have become remarkably successful in restoring the hearing abilities of profoundly hearing-impaired or deaf people. Although in most cases the understanding of continuously spoken speech reaches around 90% after a training and adaptation time of two years, key musical features like pitch and timbre are poorly transmitted by CIs, leading to a severely distorted perception of music. Because music is a ubiquitous means of sociocultural interaction, this handicap significantly degrades the quality of life of CI users. Therefore, in this article, we present recent developments that enable CI users to access music. After a brief review of the state of the art of CIs, we point out the problems of inaccurate pitch and timbre transmission as well as its implications for music perception with CIs. The main part of this article encompasses different emerging strategies for improving CI users' music enjoyment, such as customized music compositions, music preprocessing methods for the reduction of signal complexity, and improved sound coding strategies, and we describe subjective and objective instrumental evaluation procedures.