Impact of Music Therapy on Speech Intelligibility in Noise With Cochlear Implants

Improved speech perception is a main objective for any hearing rehabilitation using hearing devices. Even more challenging is speech comprehension in noisy environments.

Music therapy is one of the approaches that can assist users with achieving better performance in situations of difficult listening comprehension such as speech perception in noisy environments. One such music therapy concept developed in Heidelberg is based on the parallelism of language and music, whereby targeted training using musical parameters such as rhythm, pitch and timbre can have an impact on the ability to perceive speech. At present, the fact that music therapy can help improve speech intelligibility is primarily based on research with normal hearing listeners.

Nowadays, cochlear implant technology has the primary goal to restore functional hearing and speech perception in people with bilateral severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss. Good results will be achieved by post lingually deafened CI users regarding the understanding of open-set sentences presented in quiet. But our surroundings are rarely quiet. Therefore, the goal of good rehabilitation must be to ensure that CI users also can cope well in our noisy environment. Music therapy is thus intended to be the crucial piece in the puzzle that enables such understanding in noisy situations.

This study aims to investigate the benefits of music therapy for cochlear implant users in terms of their speech intelligibility performance in noise. This is an explorative study to determine suitable parameters such as the time point of starting the music.