Effects of frequency range, timbre and intonation on melodic contour identification with acoustic simulation of cochlear implant

The aim of this study was to determine how melodic contour identification with cochlear implant was affected by the frequency range, timbre and intonation. Noise-excited vocoder was used to simulate the signal processing for cochlear implant system. Melodic contour identification tests were carried out with eight normal-hearing subjects. Stimuli from four instruments (piano, trumpet, clarinet and violin) were utilized with different frequency ranges and intonations. Our experimental results showed that (i) temporal envelope information was important for melodic contour identification when the spectral information was limited; (ii) frequency range, timbre and intonation could influence melodic contour identification performance of the normal-hearing subjects when listening to the acoustic simulation of cochlear implant.