Music is an important part of life for many people. It can evoke a wide range of emotions, including sadness, happiness, anger, tension, relief and excitement. People with hearing loss and people with cochlear implants have reduced abilities to discriminate some of the features of musical sounds that may be involved in evoking emotions.
Music is vital in nearly all societies, enriching social interactions, providing pleasure, and expressing a broad spectrum of emotions such as sadness, happiness, anger, and excitement. The relationship between music and emotions is partly shaped by cultural influences and specific musical structures, like the tonal scale. For example, in Western music, the major mode is often associated with happiness. In contrast, the minor mode is linked to sadness, although young children may not fully recognise this distinction. Musical features such as a fast tempo and dynamic variations can evoke similar emotional responses across different cultures, conveying feelings of happiness, excitement, or calmness.
For people with average hearing, perceiving emotions in music is generally effortless. However, approximately 20% of adults experience hearing loss. Hearing loss is commonly assessed using a pure-tone audiogram, which measures the lowest sound level detectable at different frequencies. While hearing aids can partially counter the loss of sensitivity, they do not fully restore the ability to discern the acoustic features crucial for perceiving emotions in music.
Around 1% of adults have severe hearing loss and gain limited benefit from hearing aids, often requiring a cochlear implant. Cochlear implants are highly effective in improving speech comprehension but are less successful in conveying certain acoustic elements critical for music perception, such as fundamental frequency, which is linked to perceived pitch. This limitation can hinder the emotional experience of music. However, many cochlear implant users still enjoy listening to and performing music.
Research Needs and Open Issues
Most studies on how individuals with hearing difficulties perceive emotion in music have focused on manipulating mode and tempo, but these represent only a small fraction of the factors that influence emotion perception.
To understand how hearing loss impacts emotional responses to music, further research is needed to investigate additional features, such as variations in tempo, the manipulation of silent intervals between notes, and spectral changes over time.
A key issue is whether certain aspects of the signal processing used in hearing aids and cochlear implants might unintentionally impair emotion perception in music. While these devices improve audibility, their processing techniques – such as multi-channel compression – might distort the acoustic cues essential for conveying emotion. Understanding how these signal-processing methods affect emotion perception is crucial for optimising hearing devices to better serve individuals with hearing difficulties.
Moderate-to-severe hearing loss significantly impairs the ability to perceive emotion in music, with more pronounced effects in individuals with congenital hearing loss than those with acquired hearing loss. While hearing aids provide some relief, they are not entirely effective. People with hearing loss tend to perceive emotion more accurately in music with a single clear melodic line, likely because it enables a clearer perception of pitch.
Both children and adults with cochlear implants can recognise basic emotions in music, such as happiness or sadness, but they often rely on easily perceived aspects like tempo rather than fundamental frequency or harmony. Early exposure to music may improve the ability of cochlear implant users to perceive emotion, but further research is needed to clarify the role of early musical experience.