Cochlear Implants and Music
February 2003 - One of the common complaints of people
who use CIs is the difficulty they have with music. Now an English
engineer has announced innovations that will improve
music listening with a CI.
January 2006 - Advanced Bionics Working on 120 Channel
Processor
October 2006 - Teaching a
Cochlear Implantee to Play the Viola
June 2007 - Cochlear implants can help patients
enjoy listening to and making music
January 2008 - A Cochlear Implant Processor for
Encoding Music and Lowering Stimulation Power
February 2008 - Listening to Music with Your CI
August 2008 - Listening to Music through a
Cochlear Implant
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January 2006
One of the most common complaints of cochlear implant
(CI) users is that music just doesn't sound very good. Some users do
enjoy music with their CIs, but many don't. Advanced Bionics is working
on a 120 channel processor that provides enhanced music appreciation in
some CI users. The technology seems not to work for everyone, and there
are some other issues. Here's
the story.
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June 2006
It is well documented that cochlear implants do not
prevent users from appreciating music and that many wearers enjoy listening
to music. To cite a specific example, Victor Senn, a post-lingually
deafened adult, reported the following in his cochlear implant diary:
“Yesterday, I bought a CD of George Gershwin. I listened to his Rhapsody in
Blue, Lullaby, An American in Paris, and Cuban Overture. These are
wonderful music pieces." In addition to the growing body of research studies
and anecdotal accounts from cochlear implant users, there are also case
studies that support the use and esthetic gain for these individuals from
listening to music. For example, Hapel and Pahlke described a systematic
music listening program consisting of six steps that aided in the listening
process of a post-lingually deafened adult implant recipient during the
post-surgical rehabilitation phase.
Full Story
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January 2008
This 75 dB, 357 mW analog cochlear-implant processor
encodes fine-phase-timing spectral information in its asynchronous
stimulation outputs, to convey music to deaf patients. This processor
features asynchronous interleaved sampling (AIS) and uses a race-to-spike
winner-take-all strategy. This strategy ensures that sampling for electrode
stimulation occurs on only one channel at a time, thus preventing
electrode-smearing interactions. Phase-encoded, high-rate sampling of
high-intensity channels, along with lower-rate sampling of low-intensity
channels, is typically achievable. This keeps stimulation power low and
enables more natural, asynchronous stochastic stimulation of the auditory
nerve. Reconstructions of music encoded from this processor's sampled
outputs reveal significantly better fidelity compared with traditional
processing schemes, which convey only amplitude information. This
processor's power consumption is more than an order of magnitude lower than
traditional A/D-then-DSP cochlear-implant processors. Programmability is
achievable because 546 bits can alter 165 spectral and AIS parameters via a
serial interface. This article is part of a special issue on implantable
electronics.
Full Story
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
February 2008
John Redden is a deaf professional musician. He can
sing on key, harmonize on key, and hear musical intervals well enough to
reproduce them. He does this with a cochlear implant, which is a computer
chip surgically embedded in his skull. The chip drives 16 tiny electrodes
threaded into his inner ear that stimulate his auditory nerves. It gets
auditory data from an external computer sitting on his ear that looks like a
hearing aid. Instead of amplifying sound, though, it digitizes it and sends
it to the implant by radio through the skin. The technology is a marvel, but
people like Redden are a mystery. The software is designed for speech, so it
only "listens" to the speech frequencies rather than the much wider range
occupied by music. The device delivers the overall shape of sound rather
than the detailed frequency information that is crucial to distinguishing
one pitch from another.
Full Story
