Beat perception test for hearing-impaired persons

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K13246
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Special needs education
• Research Institution: Tsukuba University of Technology
• Principal Investigator: Hiraga Rumi 筑波技術大学, 産業技術学部, 教授 (70327021)
• Research Collaborator: IVERSEN John, Rehner University of California, San Diego, Institute for Neural Computation, Associate Project Scientist
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 聴覚障害 / 拍 / 音楽認知 / 特殊教育

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The purpose of the research was to establish a method to measure music perception by hearing-impaired persons. We chose "beat" perception as the basic understanding of music which they make use of in listening to music. We conducted basic experiments that explored that the difficulty levels of rhythms affect mostly in the perception of beat more than accented rhythm or rhythm with overlapped sound. From this results, we are going to complete a beat perception test for hearing-impaired persons with "real" music.
We know that there are many hearing-impaired persons who like music, while some of them who participated the experiments had difficulties in reacting the test. In order not to reduce their interest in music because of the music test, we should consider an environment, such as guiding them what is expected or the meaning of music elements prior to the test.

Free Research Field

音楽認知