Tips for enjoying music with and without a cochlear implant

“What three noises or sounds would you miss most if you could no longer hear?” asked Research Without Barriers in an online survey at the start of 2024. According to the votes of family members, that would be music. Almost half of those surveyed emphasized the importance of listening to music or the radio in their lives, while a further eleven percent would not want to miss live concerts.

CIA chairman Hans Horak describes his craving for music in the time before his implant: “I would often put my hands on the stereo speakers at home and turn the volume all the way up so that I could at least feel the rhythm.” With his first, still analog implant, he was able to sense music rather than recognize it. The COMBI 40, the first digital CI with a long electrode, changed that. “I was able to hear music the way I used to before, not just in my imagination.” Scientific studies explain the processes behind this and reveal when music sounds “good” to us:

Happy music junkies

In fact, music doesn't just affect our mood and emotions. Numerous studies show that fast-paced music increases our athletic performance. Music affects the body and promotes cognitive abilities such as perception and memory, learning and mathematical skills. Music even offers new options for pain therapy.

Although our taste in music changes over the course of our lives, it sticks to familiar patterns: a comprehensive study by the University of Cambridge confirms that rebellious youth usually prefers rebellious music and that young adults listen to a particularly large amount of music. According to the study, the five music phases of life end in the previously less appreciated pool of country, folk and pop music - that is, when we want to make listening easier for ourselves.

This seems contradictory to the experience that people tend to reject change in old age - including in music. At a young age, we define our personality and our taste,  but we also avoid new things for neurological reasons.

The neurology of enjoying music

When the brain processes different sensory impressions, it virtually catalogs their patterns - in the case of music, rhythms, timbre and chords or sound sequences. This requires a considerable amount of energy. To encourage us to save energy, our brain rewards recognized, already cataloged patterns with the happiness hormone dopamine. Author and former neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer describes the joy of music as songs subtly playing with the patterns in our brains, continually raising dopamine levels without pushing them too high. If the brain does not find suitable pattern templates, we find the sound unpleasant. “If the dopamine neurons cannot correlate their firing with external events,” Lehrer says, ”the brain is unable to form coherent associations.” The music - or the noise, as we then say - practically drives us crazy. So it's not just emotional memory that makes us like the songs of our early years so much, but rather a kind of cortical feedback spiral. We like familiar things because we know them - and that´s exactly why we like them.

According to this, new music tracks are perceived as pleasant if they are similar to familiar ones - in other words, if they use similar patterns.
New data from Japanese scientists from April 2024 shows something similar: the tonal motifs of music, regardless of the genre, must be predictable for us in order to trigger pleasant “gut feelings” such as relief, satisfaction and calm. A little surprise in the last chord causes “pleasant palpitations.”

Listening to new music with a cochlear implant

“Start with the familiar” - the title of a brochure on listening to music with CI is just right. “Can you think of a song that is so familiar to you that you 'hear in your head' when you stop and concentrate? Often such songs come from our youth, when we had the ability to memorize the words and melodies of many songs very easily.”

The fact that music initially sounds unfamiliar to many CI users is not only due to the artificial simulation of the natural nerve signal: the closer to nature, the better the fidelity of the implant. If the length of the electrodes is adapted to the individual size of the cochlea, this increases the fidelity of the sound. And the reproduction of the temporal patterns of the nerve stimulus through FineHearing coding also improves the sound.