Characterizing the effects of hearing loss and hearing aids on the neural code for music

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Music has always been fundamental to the human experience. It has been a part of every known society, serving a variety of roles from social or ritualistic to aesthetic or therapeutic. But with the advent of modern digital technologies, music is now ubiquitous. A recent UK study found that people polled by random text message were listening to music nearly half of the time.For many people, the ability to enjoy music is essential for their wellbeing. Unfortunately, this ability is increasingly at risk because of the growing burden of hearing loss (approximately 500 million people worldwide; 11 million people in the UK). Current hearing aids, which are designed to improve the perception of speech, often distort music. But without a detailed understanding of the auditory processing of music and how it is disrupted by hearing loss, it remains unclear how the benefits of hearing aids for music can be improved.We are proposing to characterize the auditory processing of music through study of the neural code -- the patterns of neural activity that underlie perception. We will study the neural code for music with and without hearing loss and hearing aids in an animal model of human hearing. The use of animals for this research is essential because the perception of complex sounds like music depends on fine details of neural activity patterns that cannot be observed directly in humans. We have recently developed new methods for large-scale recordings that allow us to observe the activity of hundreds of individual neurons simultaneously, which will enable us to provide a comprehensive characterization of the neural code. We will complement our study of the neural code with a large-scale survey of hearing aid users to help us identify the aspects of our results that are most relevant to the real-world experiences of human listeners.Our preliminary results reveal a number of effects of hearing loss on the neural code that appear to be unique to music. Thus, we expect the results of the project not only to yield new fundamental knowledge about neural coding but also to provide a foundation for the development of improved assistive listening devices and software that can significantly improve the perception and enjoyment of music for listeners with hearing loss.