Ability of nucleus cochlear implantees to recognize music

Eight adults with cochlear implants participated in experiments to test the ir ability to recognize music. Some subjects showed good ability to recogni ze songs that were sung with instrumental accompaniment but poor ability to recognize songs played on an electronic keyboard without Verbal cues, indi cating that they were recognizing the songs by verbal cues rather than by m usical qualities such as tones and melodic intervals. This conclusion was s trengthened by the finding that subjects were barely able to distinguish be tween songs with the same rhythm and pitch range, and they showed poor abil ity to discriminate musical intervals. (The closest discrimination was 4 se mitones.) Subjects had good ability to distinguish among the synthesized so unds of various musical instruments played on the electronic keyboard. We s peculate that subjects could distinguish the various musical instruments in the same way they distinguish among human Voices using spectrographic patt erns such as formants or maxima.