Cochlear Implants, Music, and Pitch Perception
I wanted to write a bit about music perception, specifically pitch perception with my implants. I was a classically-trained musician for quite a long time during my youth when my hearing was more-or-less normal. My pitch perception was relatively perfect, meaning, if you gave me a Middle C, I could re-create the entire 88 pitches in my head with very high accuracy. When I got my first implant activated and started intensive music therapy on my own, using songs I know very well, the perception was quite inaccurate. A specific example of this was using a guitar. I would play various notes, and for the most part it "sounded like" buzzing during the first 2-3 months. After that, pitch started to come through, but a weird thing happened with the actual perception of each pitch: I would perceive pitches as "different" going up and down a string, but there was also the presence of another pitch. This is best demonstrated by a picture. So essentially, ...