New coding strategies for music in cochlear implants
Summary:
Significant progress in cochlear implant (CI) signal processing has been achieved in the last decade, resulting in improved speech understanding in quiet environments. However, the perception of music and/or pitch is currently one of the major challenges. Cochlear implantees generally have extreme difficulties on pitch related tasks, such as melody or voice recognition and the perception of musical scales and tonal languages. Current CI signal processing schemes do not transmit accurately pitch information. In the last few years a number of approaches have been proposed to improve the coding of music and pitch. In this project processing strategies with more emphasis on the across-channel synchronous and explicit coding of pitch in the electrical stimulation patterns will be developed and evaluated with cochlear implant subjects.
References:
Laneau, J., Moonen, M., Wouters, J. (2006a): “Factors affecting the use of noise-band vocoders as acoustic models for pitch perception in cochlear implants”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119: 491-506.
Vandali A. et al. (2005): “Pitch ranking ability of cochlear implant recipients: a comparison of sound processing strategies”, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 117, pp. 3126-.
Laneau, J., Moonen, M., Wouters J. (2006b): “Improved music perception with explicit pitch coding in cochlear implants”, Audiology and Neuro-Otology vol. 11, pp. 38-52.
