A specific relationship between musical sophistication and auditory working memory

Abstract

Previous studies have found conflicting results between individual measures related to music and fundamental aspects of auditory perception and cognition. The results have been difficult to compare because of different musical measures being used and lack of uniformity in the auditory perceptual and cognitive measures. In this study we used a general construct of musicianship, musical sophistication, that can be applied to populations with widely different backgrounds. We investigated the relationship between musical sophistication and measures of perception and working memory for sound by using a task suitable to measure both. We related scores from the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index to performance on tests of perception and working memory for two acoustic features—frequency and amplitude modulation. The data show that musical sophistication scores are best related to working memory for frequency in an analysis that accounts for age and non-verbal intelligence. Musical sophistication was not significantly associated with working memory for amplitude modulation rate or with the perception of either acoustic feature. The work supports a specific association between musical sophistication and working memory for sound frequency.

Performance on stochastic figure-ground perception varies with individual differences in speech-in-noise recognition and working memory capacity

“…Future work may further benefit from using full musical sophistication indices, such as the Ollen Musical Sophistication Index and Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Müllensiefen et al, 2014), as a more granular and continuous measure of musicianship, rather than limiting analyses to a group comparison with a cut point. This may also be particularly interesting in the context of SFG task performance, as Lad et al (2022) found that scores on the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index were correlated with a sound frequency subconstruct of working memory, but not other subconstructs.…”

Pitch discrimination is better for synthetic timbre than natural musical instrument timbres despite familiarity

“…However, our finding that discrimination thresholds in musicians are best for flat-spectrum tones is unlikely to be due to salience conferred by acoustics, because under this explanation, we should have found better thresholds for flat-spectrum complex tones in non-musicians and in all of the sub-groups of musicians, although perhaps musicians are better at extracting pitch from natural sounds despite jitter and a lower harmonic-to-noise ratio. Another possibility is that the advantage relates to better working memory for frequency in people with musical experience, which has been previously demonstrated for pure tones ( Lad et al , 2020 ; Lad et al , 2022 ). Our task likely engaged working memory, because it required participants to compare tones that were separated by 1050 ms.…”

Predicting speech-in-noise ability in normal and impaired hearing based on auditory cognitive measures

“…As an aside, the study of Lad et al (2022) also examined links between musicality and acoustic WM and found a significant correlation. There is a longstanding debate about whether musicians have greater perceptual abilities relevant to music such as frequency discrimination: see ( Moore et al, 2019 ) for a recent investigation and discussion.…”

“…There is a longstanding debate about whether musicians have greater perceptual abilities relevant to music such as frequency discrimination: see ( Moore et al, 2019 ) for a recent investigation and discussion. In a further study ( Lad et al, 2022 ) the correlation between musicianship (based on the Goldsmith’s Musical Sophistication Index) and perceptual discrimination and WM for frequency was examined. The study showed a correlation with frequency WM but not perception of frequency.…”