Channel crossover

[Ivana Marinac]

A case which shows how important is designing properly CI electrode is next quote:

 

"Playing music

There is not a large amount of research investigating whether playing music can help with re-training the brain after a hearing loss. However there are some personal stories we can share. Daniela Andrews lost her hearing around 4 years ago, and for the last 10 months (implanted April 2010) has bilateral cochlear implants:

“At first, the piano sounded terrible. Like somebody had broken into it while I was in surgery and mixed up all the notes for fun. Playing scales barely resembled an up and down pattern at all. (This is channel crossover, caused by the electrodes being spaced too close together, stimulating the wrong nerve endings in the spiral ganglion) There were random low tones in between higher ones, and vice versa. Being simultaneously implanted brought another challenge – each processor rendered two different tones for the same note. (This is diplacusis — the same tone sounding different in each ear — which is exacerbated by the randomness caused by the channel crossover.) Familiar songs sounded alien-like with all these extra wrong notes thrown in. How was my brain ever going to make sense of that mess?”

Technically, each channel could have been remapped to produce a chromatic scale; but that would be painstaking and time consuming… And according to feedback from several CI manufacturer insiders, is above the skill level of many CI audies.

There are two parts to the solution for better music enjoyment: 

• Wider electrode spacing, to stop the crossover;
• Current steering (think of a spotlight, instead of a floodlight), to shape the charge distribution, which will fill in the gaps between the electrodes."