Music Perception of hearing-Impaired Persons with Focus on One Test Subject

We previously investigated how hearing-impaired people perceive music in several types of musical experiments. By following-up on the results of some of these experiments with a single test subject Sd, we found that the ability of the subject to perceive music was high and that she appreciated music in a way that was different from that of hearing people. In this paper, we describe three musical experiments with hearing-impaired subjects, their results, and S_d´s music perception through the experiments. The three experiments involved the Music Puzzle game, the appreciation of harmony, and tempo perception. Music Puzzle is a music game we made that is played on a tablet and is intended to be used by hearing-impaired persons as a serious game with which they can improve their hearing ability by continuously playing it. The experiment on appreciation of harmony was conducted with three subject groups, and the result showed that experience with music affected the appreciation of music accompanied with the tonal code. Tempo perception was investigated with a simple game in which the subjects tapped along with the tempo of the music. By examining the subjects´ hearing acuity in standard medical hearing tests and crossing over the results of these musical experiments, we observed that hearing acuity is not necessarily related to the perception and understanding of music.