AAA 2018 Explores New Frontiers in Music Perception of Cochlear Implant Users

It was a full house at the Judith S. Gravel Annual Vanderbilt Lecture by Charles Limb, MD, at this week's American Academy of Audiology coneference in Nashville, TN. Limb is the Francis A. Sooy Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the chief of the Division of Otology, Neurotology, and Skull Base Surgery at University of California in San Francisco.

Limb gave a fascinating presentation on the challenges affecting children with cochlear impants in the area o musicperception. Despite the adavcen in CIs, Limb's research has sound significant limitations of this technology in enabling users to have extensive epxerience of sound. However, he presented his creative an donoging work so identifu new frontiers in improving the music percenption of this patient popylation.  

"I'm most excited that were starting to identify things that could be improved. We've spent the last 10 to 15 years of the field just showing how bad everyhing was without actually being able to improve anything," Limb told The Hearing Journal after his presentation. "So we're starting to find things that might actually imporive music perception—and that's pretty exciting to me."

At the lecture, Limb showed videos of CI users with music abilities—testaments to the musicality of children who may have hearing difficulties but benefit from the use of CIs. 

Limb cited some exciting areas of advancement. "For example, some of the sutides on tuning in cochlear implant is starting to show some promise in temrs sof pitch percepton, and others have worked on on pitch processing strategies that are promising so maybe we're getting closer to more accurate pitch."

But to optimize this progress in research, it's important to address critical issues like access to CIs.

"Sadly, there are still many people who need our services but dont get access to them, and the system thatd in place to give people access to these services is pretty daunting," Limb stated. 

"I think that we to acceot as a comunity, as a people, as a goverment that hearig loss is not acceptable to just persist in our world world. if tehre treatments out there, it should be our right to get that treatment. So all of us need to get better."

Published: 4/20/2018 10:14:00 AM

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