Temporal envelope and periodicity cues on musical pitch discrimination with acoustic simulation of cochlear implant

The present study investigated musical pitch discrimination with acoustic simulation of cochlear implant. A 4-channel noise-excited vocoder was used to simulate the signal processing of cochlear implants. Eight normal-hearing subjects participated in this study. Psychoacoustic experiments on pitch-direction discrimination test were carried out to examine the ability of detecting pitch-change direction. Stimuli from four instruments (clarinet, trumpet, piano and violin) were utilized. Experimental results showed that temporal envelope and periodicity information was important for musical pitch discrimination when the spectral information was limited.