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83rd Annual Meeting of the German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery

German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery

16.05. - 20.05.2012, Mainz

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Self-assessment of CI Users before and after Using a Music-Training-Program

Meeting Abstract

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  • corresponding author presenting/speaker Doris Adams - Hearing Center of the ENT clinic of the University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany
  • Martina Brendel - Advanced Bionics GmbH, Hannover, Germany
  • Lars Pohl - Advanced Bionics GmbH, Hannover, Germany
  • Andreas Büchner - Hearing Center of the ENT clinic of the University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany
  • Thomas Lenarz - ENT clinic of the University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany
  • Angelika Illg - Hearing Center of the ENT clinic of the University of Hannover, Hannover, Germany

German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. 83rd Annual Meeting of the German Society of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. Mainz, 16.-20.05.2012. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2012. Doc12hno27

doi: 10.3205/12hno27, urn:nbn:de:0183-12hno273

Published: July 23, 2012

© 2012 Adams et al.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/deed.en). You are free: to Share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work, provided the original author and source are credited.

Outline

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Introduction: For the majority of Cochlear Implant (CI) users an open speech understanding is possible, while difficulties occur when hearing in noisy surroundings as well as when listening to music.

Experiences from our clinical routine showed, that music enjoyment become more important for long term satisfaction of CI users. Listening to music is more than the amount of auditory capabilities to discriminate pitch, melody and musical instruments. It depends on talent and personal experience and is often related to emotional events. This survey should evaluate the musical perception of CI users before and after using a music-training-program that had been developed to become more satisfied with listening to music with CI step by step.

Method: So far 11 CI users were asked to complete a questionnaire regarding their musical experience before and after a three-month period of training with “Advanced Bionics Musikwelt”. Participants had a mean age at test of 52.4 years (range: 34.3 to 79.0 years), a mean duration of implant use of 5.5 years (range 0.6 to 13.4 years) and a mean duration of deafness of 10.8 years (range: 0.0 to 41.4 years). All participants were implanted with an Advanced Bionics implant system, either the Clarion or the HiRes90K device with any available processor and speech coding strategy. Five of them were bilaterally and six unilaterally implanted. “Musikwelt“ offers popular pieces of music divided in five different sections (musical mood, recognition of instruments, voices, languages and lyrics) and several degrees of difficulty.

Results: Participants listened to music in background as well as to enjoy themselves by listening to it. More than 50% listened to music for at least one time per day. Currently our evaluation shows, that three of eleven questions concerning the self-assessment of musical characteristics improved significantly after a three-month use of “Musikwelt”: musical style, number of instruments and the change of mood on TV.

Conclusions: Previous studies showed that it is still a big challenge for CI users to enjoy listening to music. Furthermore we know that hearing music with CI regularly, could lead to a new enjoyment step by step.

The results of this study seem to indicate that a regular use of “Musikwelt” could lead to an improvement in verifying musical features and help people enjoying music with Cochlear Implant again. For final conclusions a higher number of datasets will be required.