@Jody @joanhawsey the bagpipes concert A pitch is higher still though.
This explains why it sounds so crappy with a CI. You just about need near perfect hearing to get a really good listening experience. I don’t think any CI company would give a good listening experience with bagpipes, when the pitch is that high.
Reading the posts here sure shuts down music. I don’t agree with this at all.
I have zero experience with bagpipes so I can not add to that experience.
Now I do listen to rock and roll from the 60’s through 2000 for example. When I first got my CI’s music really was bad and I did not practice listening to it. Music did not get better until I spent a lot of time listening to it with an open mind. It has taken many months but music is getting much better. Like speech it takes practice.
I might have to listen to some bagpipes and just see what they are like.
There is more to CI hearing than science. The brain is plastic and is very flexible.
iI lisstened to bagpipe, it was terrible but i could hear the high frequency that droning in .but i couldn’t make out the details without my hearing aid in my ear
It doesn’t shut down all music though, just bagpipes. I also am a R & R lover, I listen to Rock an awful lot and really enjoy it and have a good experience with this genre.
@ssa yes pipes and CI’s just don’t agree with each other. I can hear the low notes and drones but the high frequencies are absolutely blooming awful.
I have pitch recognition through the cochlear if I listen really carefully and the notes are distinct and about half an octave apart. Less than that & it’s tricky. Certainly, the nuances of an ensemble playing together with the notes mashed together is not possible. When I had a hybrid acoustic/electric component for a few months, it was better but still not perfect. I definitely don’t have enough pitch definition to play an unfretted instrument like a cello. Even piano would be hard, but I could give it a go, stay roughly to the right key and call it jazz! 
Using my good ear only, cello is possible in an ensemble. It’s just really hard without the other ear to listen to others.
There’s also a big difference through the cochlear between rock music with a definite best and fewer instruments vs classical music with a less definite beat and complex harmonies.
I span genres from classical to jazz to pop to modern worship music, across guitar, keys (acoustic piano, electric keyboards, etc), cello, & percussion. I do play purely acoustically now when needed, but try to offload to others if possible & reserve my performances for IEMs if possible.
I also do live sound engineering. This is still possible. However, judging overall volume is very difficult & I rely much more on my sound pressure meter than I did in the past.
@bcarp Thanks, that was what I was thinking as I read the others’ responses. I mostly listen to classical and jazz, and play in concert band, jazz big bang, and small swing band. I think in rock music, there is both a strong beat and lyrics to tide you over and help make sense of the music. I worry about my situation - not being able to distinguish notes that are less than a half-octave apart would be murder.
As you are a bimodal user, like I would be, I wonder if you think the following suggestion would work for acoustic ensemble playing (this was suggested to me by an AB Consumer Specialist): when playing in group and it’s important to hear the people on both sides, take off your CI processor gear and use a CROS (or BiCROS) hearing aid to send all the sound from your bad side to your other ear. Do you think that would work for you?
Yes it is very diffcult because you have like 10-20 db electrical dynamic range… they have to compress the incoming sound can be 0-140 db. the sound processor have a very difficult job of putting them in the right loudness based on your electrical dynamic range…
No i think you will find the CI to be better bimodally than CROS system but you are welcome to try it and experiment. you have 2 brains in your head so you have 2 data cable connected to your brain so take advantage of it ( left and right brain and 2 auditory nerves… )
@Jody BiCros aids wouldn’t work for me either. Firstly because my residual hearing wasn’t preserved. Therefore I have virtually no natural hearing in my CI ear.
Secondly because my aided ear, I have profound loss and speech clarity just isn’t good. Without my processor on speech is so very difficult to understand, I’m virtually just hearing sounds. So for me all that would be sent to my CI ear would be a whole pile of unintelligible sounds.
I have norm hearing on one side and a CI on the other. Your suggestion of a CROS system sounds like it might work well for my situation, and perhaps yours too if it’s similar. You could keep the CI on, and add a CROS system to route sounds from the CI side to the normal side too, I suppose.
I still have one normal hearing ear. Judging volume is still very difficult with or without the sound processor in the CI side.
If I understood correctly, CL cannot provide a full experience in listening to music as a healthy ear or as a normal hearing aid, because the electrodes that are inserted into the cochlea are not able to transmit all sound frequencies. Is it an obstacle or can it still be solved with a more detailed adjustment so that all the tones are good ???
Yes, correct. The man made cochlear array that is surgically inserted into the cochlea is not as sophisticated as the human ear.
Is there a chance to develop it to be better?? Supposedly, manufacturers put more electrodes, but I’m not sure how much it improves the sound?
I don’t know the answer to your question, others here might.
Just thinking about how technology changes daily it seems very possible.
New music is difficult for me with bilateral CI. Old music that I remember from the past can sound very much like it used to before losing my hearing. It just goes to show how flexible our brains are.
@Deaf_piper - I understand that it wouldn’t work for you given your situation, but I think perhaps I have not described it correctly - the CROS aid would not be on the un-CI side sending sound to the CI side, but on the CI side, sending sound to the un-CI side. In other words, for people like me who can make out pitches with our hearing-aided side, in a group musical situation, we would take off our CI gear and replace it with a CROS aid to send sounds from the side that no longer hears to the hearing-aided ear.
Isn’t that really auditory memory? My friend who has had a CI for 8 years can’t recognize old songs until her husband tells her the name. Then she remembers the lyrics, and then she can “hear” them.
I think there’s also the technical limitation of feeding the electrode all the way to the central cochlear. The space is too small for the (current-day) electrode to fit. Without getting the electrode all the way in, the part of the cochlear that senses lower frequency sounds is not being stimulated.
Seems I remember it the other way around.
The big end of the cochlea is low frequency. The smaller end further into the cochlea is higher frequencies.
Interesting thread.
All of us CI people each have opinions of CI.
We all made the big decision to do it for whatever reasons.
For me it was just trying to have a good conversation and maybe hear some good music.
Thanks, I was wrong on my thinking.
The picture is a great reference.