Appreciating Harmony-differences between the hearing-impaired, musically inexperienced, and musically experienced

In this paper, we describe an experiment on the cognition of harmony done by three groups: people who have hearing-impairments, people who have little experience of playing music, and people who have a lot experience of playing music. By modifying the accompaniment key, we prepared five types of harmony for a single melody, provided them to the subjects, and asked for their preferred harmony. Their preferences for the accompaniments differed. People with music experience strongly preferred the original accompaniment, while hearing-impaired people cared little about whatever the harmony was. Two hearing groups´ preferences did not differ much for the original and other accompaniments, but people with little musical experience had the preferences they lay between those of the other two subject groups. Though many hearing-impaired people are fond of music, this experiment on the cognition of harmony did not find that they appreciate musical harmony. The results of the different preferences of people with a little and a lot of musical experience suggest their preferences may differ between in other aspects of music.