Dominant Melody Enhancement in Cochlear Implants

The ability of cochlear implant (CI) users to accurately perceive and enjoy listening to music has remained unsatisfactory in a significant subset of users. Basic elements of music such as pitch, melody, and timbre that are easily discerned by normal-hearing (NH) listeners are difficult for CI users to perceive, owing to factors such as limited resolution of the devices' electrode array, audio processing that relies on coarse separation of the frequency spectrum into a limited number of overlapping bands, and temporal envelope extraction that discards the temporal fine structure. Alternative signal processing methods have been explored to enhance music enjoyment in CI users, with varying results, and most are computationally complex or require reprogramming of the audio processing device. This paper explores a new pre-processing technique to enhance music enjoyment in CI listeners through extraction and enhancement of the music's dominant melody, a technique we refer to as DoME (Dominant Melody Enhancement). In the described pilot studies, we employed a DoME technique of adding a frequency-modulated sine wave at the fundamental frequency (F0) of the music's dominant melody, and conducted perceptual experiments on nine CI users to gauge the effect of DoME on their music enjoyment. Initial results suggest DoME could increase some CI users' enjoyment of music listening.