Our symposium proposed in collaboration with Dr. David Landsberger (NYU) was accepted at ARO 2017. The title is “Symposium: Auditory implants: Improving auditory function from pre-processing to peripheral and central mechanisms.”
Christina Fuller and music training with cochlear implants in the news
Dr. Christina Fuller has recently completed her PhD work on music and cochlear implants. Part of her research was on providing music training to cochlear-implant users, to explore what hearing benefits different training approaches may provide to this group. This also lead to a wonderful collaboration with the Prins Claus Conservatorium, where Dr. Robert Harris provided a pilot training to a small group of implant users.
These efforts are featured on De Kennis van Nu:
https://dekennisvannu.nl/site/artikel/Muziekles-voor-doven-om-beter-te-kunnen-horen/8675
Our research featured at Scientific American
A potential transfer-of-training advantage musicians may have in speech perception remains an elusive topic. Our recent research on musician effect on speech perception (Başkent, D., and Gaudrain, E., 2016, Musician advantage for speech-on-speech perception, JASA-EL 139, EL51-EL56) has shown a strong musician effect for speech on speech perception (single target talker and single masker talker). We had also manipulated the difference in the voices of the masker and target speech, as we suspected the root of musician effect to be better perception of voice cues. This idea, however, did not seem to hold, leading to many more questions on where this advantage may be coming from.
This research is now featured at a fun Scientific American podcast:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/bring-a-musician-to-untangle-cocktail-party-din/