Cochlear Implants and Auditory Brainstem Implants: Understanding 
auditory processing through prosthetic stimulation of hearing
Robert V. Shannon, Biomedical Engineering USC and House Ear Institute

 Cochlear implants and auditory brainstem implants are highly successful
prosthetic devices that use electrical pulses to activate the auditory 
nerve or auditory brainstem to restore hearing to deaf people. At the 
same time these devices are powerful tools for auditory neuroscience. 
A detailed understanding of the auditory capabilities of patients with
 these devices can help us understand the physiological underpinnings 
of different levels of auditory perception. Examples will be provided 
to demonstrate the quite different requirements for speech recognition 
vs musical pitch recognition. Speech recognition only requires coarse 
representations of spectral patterns changing slowly over time, whereas
 musical pitch requires much more detailed spectral resolution and finer
 timing information.