Contribution
Neural Processing of Pitch Relations within Spectrally Sparse Musical Chords in Cochlear Implant Listeners
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Musical harmony is essential in western music perception. However, in cochlear implant (CI) listeners, harmony perception is severely limited. One potential limitation in CI listeners is that the simultaneous occurrence of music chord components (voices) leads to complex interactions between electrodes in the cochlea. A possible solution might be a reduction of spectral complexity of sounds. In an oddball paradigm, we investigated cognitive harmonic integration of spectrally sparse musical chords composed of three-component harmonic complex tones. We tested post-lingually implanted CI listeners and normal-hearing (NH) controls. Participants were presented with frequent standard triads (i.e., three simultaneous tones) and infrequent deviant triads that differed from standards by one semitone in one or two voices (e.g., major and minor triads, respectively). Critically, it was procedurally ensured that participants judge voice relations rather than track individual voices. Participants responded by keypress whenever they perceived a deviant triad. In addition to behavioral judgements, we investigated whether participants exhibited significant brain responses (i.e., mismatch negativity) following deviant stimuli, by using electroencephalography. Data collection is ongoing; yet, preliminary results show that NH as well as CI listeners process voice relations within spectrally sparse musical chords on a neural level.