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

音乐一直是人类体验的基础。它已经成为每个已知社会的一部分，扮演着从社会或仪式到美学或治疗的各种角色。但随着现代数字技术的出现，音乐现在无处不在。英国最近的一项研究发现，通过随机短信进行调查的人有近一半的时间在听音乐。对许多人来说，享受音乐的能力对他们的健康至关重要。不幸的是，由于听力损失的负担日益加重（全球约有5亿人;英国有1100万人），这种能力正面临越来越大的风险。目前的助听器，旨在改善语音的感知，往往扭曲音乐。但是，如果没有对音乐的听觉处理过程以及听力损失如何破坏听觉处理过程的详细了解，那么如何提高助听器对音乐的益处仍然是不清楚的。我们建议通过研究神经代码来描述音乐的听觉处理过程-神经活动模式是感知的基础。我们将在人类听觉的动物模型中研究有听力损失和助听器的音乐的神经代码。使用动物进行这项研究是必不可少的，因为对音乐等复杂声音的感知取决于神经活动模式的细节，而这些细节在人类身上无法直接观察到。我们最近开发了大规模记录的新方法，使我们能够同时观察数百个单个神经元的活动，这将使我们能够提供神经代码的全面表征。我们将通过对助听器用户的大规模调查来补充我们对神经代码的研究，以帮助我们确定我们的研究结果中与人类听众的真实体验最相关的方面。我们的初步结果揭示了听力损失对神经代码的一些影响，这些影响似乎是音乐所独有的。因此，我们期望该项目的结果不仅产生关于神经编码的新的基础知识，而且还为改进的辅助听力设备和软件的开发提供基础，这些设备和软件可以显着改善听力损失听众对音乐的感知和享受。

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.