In the quest to understand the profound appeal of music and its capacity to evoke deep emotions, researchers faced a complex challenge: translating music into electrical signals for cochlear implant recipients. While these devices excelled at speech comprehension, the enjoyment of music remained elusive, until MED-EL's pioneering approach introduced the Fine Structure Processing (FSP) coding strategy in 2008, revolutionizing music perception and sound quality for implant users.
In the first part of MED-EL’s story, we followed our quest to bring music enjoyment back to cochlear implant recipients. Even with poor sound quality, robotic-sounding speech, and cartoon-character voices, cochlear implant recipients were able to demonstrate good speech understanding scores, but they found music unpleasant to listen to.
