Optimisation of rate-pitch perception in cochlear implant hearing

Abstract

It is well established that Cochlear implants (CIs) enable moderate-to-profoundly deaf people to understand speech without the aid of lip reading. However, the perception of voice and musical pitch by implantees is far from satisfactory. The limitations stem from an inability to code and perceive detailed information about the fundamental frequency (F0) in signals, which in normal hearing provides the principle cue to pitch. Present CI systems instead focus on conveying information about the signal’s envelope. In these systems, F0-pitch (albeit somewhat weaker than that of normal hearing) is coded over a limited range by way of amplitude modulation in the temporal (time) envelope. Howev..