Melodic contour identification was measured in cochlear implant (CI) and normal-hearing (NH) subjects for piano samples processed by four bandpass filters: low (310–620 Hz), middle (620–2480 Hz), high (2480–4960 Hz), and full (310–4960 Hz). NH performance was near-perfect for all filter ranges and much higher than CI performance. The best mean CI performance was with the middle frequency range; performance was much better for some CI subjects with the middle rather than the full filter. These results suggest that acoustic filtering may reduce potential mismatches between fundamental frequencies and harmonic components thereby improving CI users’ melodic pitch perception.
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