title: Accurate guitar tuning by cochlear implant musicians.
abstract: Modern cochlear implant (CI) users understand speech but find difficulty in music appreciation due to poor pitch perception. Still, some deaf musicians continue to perform with their CI. Here we show unexpected results that CI musicians can reliably tune a guitar by CI alone and, under controlled conditions, match simultaneously presented tones to <0.5 Hz. One subject had normal contralateral hearing and produced more accurate tuning with CI than his normal ear. To understand these counterintuitive findings, we presented tones sequentially and found that tuning error was larger at ∼ 30 Hz for both subjects. A third subject, a non-musician CI user with normal contralateral hearing, showed similar trends in performance between CI and normal hearing ears but with less precision. This difference, along with electric analysis, showed that accurate tuning was achieved by listening to beats rather than discriminating pitch, effectively turning a spectral task into a temporal discrimination task.
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: Mind-Brain Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America.
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery, University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, United States of America.
authors.forename: Fan-Gang
authors.initials: FG
authors.lastname: Zeng
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009146:Music; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013067:Speech Perception