The effect of musical experience on rhythm perception for hearing-impaired undergraduates

This paper describes an experiment on the rhythm perception by hearing-impaired people using three musical contents: vocal-based songs, vocal-only songs, and instrumental music. The real world consists of many kinds of sounds, not only human speech but also music, songs, and environmental noises. Although typical listening ability exercises these days are primarily optimized for perception of speech rather than other sounds, we assume that musical features can help hearing-impaired people to segregate information sounds and the other sounds. Our project is intended to create a musical training that enhances hearing-impaired people´s listening ability. In this study, to begin the project, we investigated how the hearing-impaired people recognize the rhythmical features in listening to the songs. Nine hearing-impaired undergraduates participated in the tapping experiment. Experimental results showed that musical experience significantly improved their rhythm perception.