6.2 Meaning of music
In spite of the difficulty in completing the game, the deaf and hard of hearing participants enjoyed the game, and they preferred music to the other types of sound. The results are
consistent with our preliminary experiments. The sound of music seems to be attractive to persons with hearing loss also in a game situation like the one presented.
We suggest two possible explanations to why deaf and hard of hearing people prefer music to other sounds: 1) Mu-sical sound is generally different from speech in that it has a broader frequency band, a complex combination of the fundamental frequency and overtones, and clearer rhythmic patterns. These properties of musical sound give deaf and hard of hearing people relevant clues that they may find more interesting or useful than other types of sound. 2) As we supposed in Section ??, in the absence of non-verbal in- formation, the acoustic contents of speech signals seem to convey less information.
On the other hand, the reason for the low preference to the combination sound is an open question. It would be reasonable to assume that the added acoustic and semantic cues of a poem and a music piece would be richer than one of these alone. However, as the read poem and music were taken from two different sources and mixed by the authors, we can anticipate that the aesthetic quality leaves something to wish for.