Effects of Musical Training and Hearing Loss on Fundamental Frequency Discrimination and Temporal Fine Structure Processing: Psychophysics and Modeling

Abstract

Several studies have shown that musical training leads to improved fundamental frequency ( F 0 ) discrimination for young listeners with normal hearing (NH). It is unclear whether a comparable effect of musical training occurs for listeners whose sensory encoding of F 0 is degraded. To address this question, the effect of musical training was investigated for three groups of listeners (young NH, older NH, and older listeners with hearing impairment, HI). In a first experiment, F 0 discrimination was investigated using complex tones that differed in harmonic content and phase configuration (sine, positive, or negative Schroeder). Musical training was associated with significantly better F 0 discrimination of complex tones containing low-numbered harmonics for all groups of listeners. Part of this effect was caused by the fact that musicians were more robust than non-musicians to harmonic roving. Despite the benefit relative to their non-musicians counterparts, the older musicians, with or without HI, performed worse than the young musicians. In a second experiment, binaural sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) cues was assessed for the same listeners by estimating the highest frequency at which an interaural phase difference was perceived. Performance was better for musicians for all groups of listeners and the use of TFS cues was degraded for the two older groups of listeners. These findings suggest that musical training is associated with an enhancement of both TFS cues encoding and F 0 discrimination in young and older listeners with or without HI, although the musicians’ benefit decreased with increasing hearing loss. Additionally, models of the auditory periphery and midbrain were used to examine the effect of HI on F 0 encoding. The model predictions reflected the worsening in F 0 discrimination with increasing HI and accounted for up to 80 % of the variance in the data.

Effects of age on psychophysical measures of auditory temporal processing and speech reception at low and high levels

“…We did not find evidence of age effects on F0 discrimination of unresolved complex tones in the current study, consistent with the results of Bianchi, Carney, Dau, Santurette, 2019 . Although our results rule out the hypothesis that age per se may have large effects on F0 discrimination of unresolved complex tones, the CIs for the age effect were not very narrow, and are compatible with the possibility that small age effects exist but were not detected in the current study.…”

Sensitivity to Interaural Phase in Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners Correlates With Nonauditory Trail Making Scores and With a Spatial Auditory Task of Unrelated Peripheral Origin

“…Bianchi et al. (2019) observed that both NH and HI musicians with at least 8 years of formal music education showed lower IPD FLs than nonmusicians.…”

“…In this study, we adopted a training paradigm that has been used in many previous studies exploring IPD discrimination with tone sequence stimuli (e.g., Bianchi et al., 2019; Füllgrabe et al., 2017; Hopkins & Moore, 2011; Neher et al., 2011): IPD cues were initially replaced with ILD cues, because ILD cues presumably result in more discriminable lateralization for all participants, in particular for older HI listeners. However, Ortiz and Wright (2010) found that, in order to improve NH listeners’ ITD discrimination performance, training based on ITD discrimination proved more effective than ILD discrimination.…”

Speech perception is similar for musicians and non-musicians across a wide range of conditions

“…Some studies have suggested that musical training is associated with improved speech perception in noise 1–3 , and that the benefit of musical training may protect against some of the deleterious effects of age on speech perception in noise 4 . However, although it is generally accepted that musical training is associated with improved skills relevant for music, such as pitch discrimination 5–9 , pitch interval discrimination 10,11 and rhythm discrimination 12,13 , its association with speech perception in noise and other challenging conditions remains disputed because of several failures to find such an effect 7,8,14,15 .…”