Appreciation of music in adult patients with cochlear implants: a patient questionnaire

Abstract

Many cochlear implant candidates express hopes of enjoying music following implantation. Our aim was to assess the appreciation of music after cochlear implantation in adult patients. Thirty-five out of 45 cochlear implantees (78%) from the North East Programme responded to a questionnaire. Only 16 out of 35 patients (46%) listened to music after implantation. Enjoyment of music on a self-assessment scale was graded a mean of 8.7/10 before deafness but only 2.6/10 after implantation. Listening to music after implantation was more likely in younger patients, those with higher speech perception scores and those with a shorter length of deafness, but was not found to be related to gender, type of implant, processing strategy, time since implant or music enjoyment before becoming deaf. Appreciation of music after cochlear implantation is disappointingly low. Future developments in implant technology should strive to improve satisfaction with music listening.

The family oriented musical training for children with cochlear implants: Speech and musical perception results of two year follow-up

“…Research shows that listeners with cochlear implants do not perform well when listening to music [29][30][31]. It is believed that the main reason for this is that listeners with cochlear implants do not perceive pitch well.…”

Cochlear Implant-Mediated Perception of Nonlinguistic Sounds

“…As a result of the broad success of implantation, two trends have emerged: an ever increasing incidence of cochlear implantation in the prelingually deaf population and greater expectations in the postlingually deaf population of what CIs are able to provide (Zwolan et al 1996;Mirza et al 2006). Both these trends encourage clinicians and scientists to once again examine the issue of nonlinguistic sound perception more focally.…”

Characteristics and determinants of music appreciation in adult CI users

“…Multiple studies have shown that CI recipients experience more difficulties in perceiving music than NH subjects or HA recipients [9,16,20,23,29]. Since music perception skills do not reflect music appraisal or enjoyment, some researchers have addressed this topic by means of questionnaires [7,26,28,30,32,36,37]. Not surprisingly, Gfeller et al [7], Lassaletta et al [32] and Looi and She [28] report that post-implantation, people enjoy music less compared to before receiving their CI, which is confirmed in our study.…”

“…A Dutch questionnaire to gain insight in music appreciation was developed based on literature and clinical experience [7,19,26,29,32]. Patients were asked a number of questions regarding their music listening habits before becoming deaf and after cochlear implantation.…”

“…The majority of previous researchers has tended to focus on music perception, rather than on music appreciation in adult CI users [5,9,10,15,16,[20][21][22][23][24]. A smaller number of studies focused on music appraisal or enjoyment by means of self-reported questionnaires or testing appraisal of musical excerpts [7,19,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. These studies have all shown a substantial intersubject variability among CI recipients for music appraisal or enjoyment.…”