Many people with cochlear implants find listening to music to be unbearable because the hearing aids are designed to amplify and process speech, but don’t handle complex sounds — like music — very well.

But now engineers at Columbia University are working to create music that is more enjoyable to those with cochlear implants.

Dr. Anil Lalwani, director of the Columbia Cochlear Implant Program, is heading up an initiative to reengineer and simplify music in a way that makes it more palatable to those with hearing aids.

"It's unrealistic to expect people with that kind of nerve loss to process the complexity of a symphony, even with an implant," said Lalwani.

Working with members of Columbia's Cochlear Implant Music Engineering Group, Lalwani is testing different arrangements of musical compositions to learn which parts of the music are most important for listener enjoyment and if those segments can be separated out for those with implants.

"You don't necessarily need the entire piece to enjoy the music," Lalwani said. "Even though a song may have very complex layers, you can sometimes just enjoy the vocals, or you can just enjoy the instruments.

"It's not the same for somebody who has normal hearing, and that's what we have to learn."

Lalwani’s team hopes its efforts will return the enjoyment of music to people who’ve given it up because of cochlear implants. People like Prudence Garcia-Renart, who is participating in the Columbia group’s research project.

"I've pretty much given up listening to music and being able to enjoy it," said Garcia-Renart, a musician who gave up playing the piano a few years ago. "I've had the implant for 15 years now and it has done so much for me. Before I got the implant, I was working but I could not use a phone, I needed somebody to take notes for me at meetings, and I couldn't have conversations with more than one person. I can now use a phone, I recognize people's voices, I go to films, but music is awful."

Lalwani believes software will one day be able to take an original piece of music and reconfigure it for listeners with cochlear implants or give them the ability to reengineer their own music.

"Our eventual goal, though, is to compose music for people with cochlear implants based on what we've learned," Lalwani said. "Original pieces of music that will possibly have less rhythmic instruments, less reverb, possibly more vocals — something that is actually designed for them."

A YouTube video of the team's work is posted here.