Cochlear implants are a common method of correcting hearing loss for individuals with damage to their brain, inner ear, or auditory nerves. The implanted devices use an electrode inserted into the cochlea and helps stimulate auditory nerve fibers. However, the speech patterns heard when using an implant are often spectrally degraded and can be difficult to understand. Vocodal speech, or distorted speech that imitates speech by a cochlear implant, is used in acoustic and auditory research to investigate speech comprehension under a variety of circumstances.

Musical Ability and Better Communication

Musical ability, described by a person's ability to play an instrument, interpret sound patterns, or recognize different tones, has long been linked to higher cognitive capacity and better communication skills. Scientists are now testing to see if a person's musicality or levels of musical experience impact their perceptions of speech recognition. So the question lies in how music affects the ability to hear different pitches, intonations and rhythms in distorted speech. The acoustic information in vocoded speech is very different from that of natural speech in the presence of noise. The rhythmic patterns of natural speech are often maintained in vocod speech, so musicians can prevail in interpretation due to their experience with rhythm production. However, musicians can also stand up fairly for non-musicians because of the loss of information.

Gottfried:

“Over the years, I have continued my studies on this relationship between speech and music perception and there has been a lot of recent research suggesting that musical experience is not only related to improved speech perception in the second language, but also improved phonetic perception. in one's first language and better recognition of speech in noise.”

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