ABSTRACT
Deaf individuals often still enjoy music not only with the limited auditory signals they may receive, but also with visual and vibrotactile cues to the music. Hearing aids and cochlear implants were originally designed to benefit speech understanding, but engineers have begun to develop technologies to benefit music listening as well. Moreover, the technologies involved with assistive listening devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants do not simply turn up the volume of sound. Cochlear implants are auditory prostheses for listeners with the greatest degrees of hearing loss. Adults with post-lingual hearing loss have had the opportunity to build their internal representations and understandings of music over years of experience listening to, participating in, and learning music. The broad category of pitch perception includes a range of specific tasks such as pitch discrimination and melody recognition. The groups of children performed best for the rising contour, followed by the falling and rising-falling contours, and finally the falling-rising contour.
