EVALUATION OF MUSIC PERCEPTION IN ADULT USERS OF HIRES® 120 AND PREVIOUS GENERATIONS OF ADVANCED BIONICS® SOUND CODING STRATEGIES

Gazibegovic D (1), Arnold L (1), Rocca C (1,2), Boyle P (1).

(1) Advanced Bionics Europe, France; (2) Mary Hare, London, UK.

Objectives: In 2007 Advanced Bionics has launched the novel sound coding strategy HiRes 120.The strategy incorporates the concept of current steering and offers up to 120 stimulation sites using only 16 electrodes.

Early clinical results showed improved speech understanding in noisy environments. Also the naturalness of speech and music and the sound quality overall were improved.

Objective of the evaluation is to observe if there is a difference in music perception, listening frequency, enjoyment and ability to differentiate special musical features, between the three main group of subjects using different generations of strategies:

- CIS/MPS/SAS

- HiRes

- HiRes 120

Methods: The evaluation is based on a questionnaire. Forty questions are divided into several sections:

Individual sections will help collecting information on etiology, equipment used for listening to music, sound coding strategy, frequency of listening to music, musical activity, and enjoyment of music before becoming deaf and with the cochlear implant. Last section is assessing subject’s ability to follow melodic and harmonic structure of music and to investigate its impact on emotions.

Results: In the pilot phase of the evaluation a group of twenty five normal hearing subjects were tested as control group. Preliminary results suggest that the normal hearing subjects are performing quite well (Average 8 on a scale 1-10) in majority of the tasks. There are few tasks as “identifying how many instruments are playing together” or “understanding words in new music”, which appear to be more difficult for some subjects (4-6 on a scale 1-10).

Discussion: Based on the data obtained from normal hearing subjects, the evaluation seems to be appropriate to collect a large number of data within a short time frame. The results may help understanding how much cochlear implanted subjects do listen and enjoy music and if the advances in sound coding strategies are improving these abilities.

Email:dzemalg@abionics.fr