Music Is More Enjoyable With Two Ears, Even If One of Them Receives a Degraded Signal Provided By a Cochlear Implant.

The cochlear implant findings come from a small lab group: 12 participants were tested, and one was excluded. The outcome was personal enjoyment on a slider, not communication, speech, or real-world listening. Only two song segments were used, Ring of Fire and Rhapsody in Blue, so the result may not apply to other music. The participants had one normal or near-normal ear and a cochlear implant in the other ear, so the findings may not generalize to cochlear implant users without acoustic hearing. In normal-hearing listeners, a noise vocoder was used to imitate a cochlear implant, and the paper states that a vocoder does not accurately represent the sound quality of an implant. Four of 13 normal-hearing participants in experiment 3 were excluded because they did not rate the hidden reference between 90 and 110. Familiarity with the songs was not formally collected, and one song had English lyrics while some participants were native Flemish speakers. The benefit in implant users was seen only in experienced users, and the paper does not know whether newly implanted users would show the same effect. Testing took 2 to 4 hours per subject, so ratings may have been affected by fatigue.

The article is listed as supported by NIH and non-U.S. government research support. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not conclude that cochlear implants make music enjoyable for all implant users. The implant-only ratings were very low, and the improvement was measured only when the implant was used together with a normal-hearing ear in a lab. Do not use the normal-hearing two-ear result as proof that a cochlear implant will improve communication or participation.