Fundamental Frequency Discrimination in Cochlear Implants

Abstract:
Fundamental frequency discrimination in cochlear implants is poor, affecting music appreciation, tonal language intelligibility and speech in noise perception. In this study we propose a new coding strategy that implements an explicit coding of the fundamental frequency by extracting the fundamental frequency from the voiced sounds in the signal and modulating all filterbank outputs with a sine at the fundamental frequency. First clinical results are presented and discussed. Fundamental frequency discrimination with the new scheme is significantly better than with the clinically used ACE(TM) strategy.