Musician Enhancement for Speech-In-Noise

Abstract

Musical experience appears to enhance the ability to hear speech in challenging listening environments. Large group differences were found for QuickSIN, and the results also suggest that this enhancement is derived in part from musicians' enhanced working memory and frequency discrimination. For HINT, in which performance was not linked to frequency discrimination ability and was only moderately linked to working memory, musicians still performed significantly better than the nonmusicians. The group differences for HINT were evident in the most difficult condition in which the speech and noise were presented from the same location and not spatially segregated. Understanding which cognitive and psychoacoustic factors as well as which lifelong experiences contribute to SIN may lead to more effective remediation programs for clinical populations for whom SIN poses a particular perceptual challenge. These results provide further evidence for musical training transferring to nonmusical domains and highlight the importance of taking musical training into consideration when evaluating a person's SIN ability in a clinical setting.

Generality and specificity in the effects of musical expertise on perception and cognition

“…As expected given past results (Kishon-Rabin et al, 2001;Micheyl et al, 2006;Strait et al, 2010;Parbery-Clark et al, 2009b;Teki et al, 2012) we found musicians to be more sensitive than non-musicians to changes in three fundamental acoustical parameters: attack envelope (onset rise time), frequency excursion (FM depth), and carrier amplitude (AM depth). Musicians' finer perceptual skills did not extend to a visual measure or reflect a general advantage on psychophysical tasks in that they did not differ from controls in discriminating gradations in color hue -a perceptual skill not associated with musical expertise.…”

“…Moreover, we did not find that our violinist cohort -who spent significantly greater time in ensembles (see ST 2) -performed any better than our pianist cohort. These results contrast with previous reports of enhanced musician performance under the demands of competing speech (Parbery-Clark et al, 2009a, 2009b, 2011Strait et al, 2012b), sources of informational masking (Oxenham et al, 2003; see footnote 10), backward masking (Strait et al, 2010), and detection of auditory objects (Zendel & Alain, 2009. Our findings also contrast with previous evidence that specific expertise with ensemble settings benefits selective attention to spatially segregated sounds (Nager et al, 2003).…”

“…A considerable body of research suggests that musicians tend to out-perform non-musicians in perceiving fine differences in a number of basic auditory properties, including frequency and/or pitch (Spiegel & Watson, 1984;Micheyl et al, 2006;Kishon-Rabin et al, 2001;Amir, Amir & Kishon-Rabin, 2003;Nikjeh, Lister & Frisch, 2009;Koelsch, Schröger & Tervaniemi, 1999;Parbery-Clark et al, 2009b), tone interval size (Zarate, Ritson & Poeppel, 2012Siegel & Siegel, 1977), temporal interval size (Rammsayer & Altenmüller, 2006;Cicchini et al, 2012;Ehrle & Samson, 2005), and timbre (Pitt, 1994). Below, we review evidence for lower-level and contextually-relevant perceptual advantages in differently trained musician cohorts.…”

“…Orchestral conductors -whose primary role is to analyze, interpret, and manipulate a colossal auditory sceneshow enhanced selectivity in attending to spatially segregated auditory signals (noise bursts), when compared to both pianists and non-musicians (Nager et al, 2003). Musicians' long experience in musically-based scene analysis may also be a causal factor in their enhanced ability to comprehend speech when the speech signal is masked by noise (classic 'energetic' masking) or multi-talker babble (energetic plus so-called 'informational masking' -see footnote 4; Parbery-Clark et al, 2009a, 2009b, 2011Strait & Kraus, 2011b;Strait et al, 2012b; but see also Patel, 2011). However, recent data suggest that musicians and non-musicians do not differ in susceptibility to informational and energetic masking during speech-in-noise perception (Ruggles et al, 2014).…”

“…This is partly due to the difficulties of researching expert musician cohorts (e.g., recruitment, study time constraints, etc.) Few studies have investigated interactions between cognitive and perceptual outcomes relevant to musical training, or assessed predictive relationships between fine perceptual and higher cognitive skills such as attention (but see Strait et al, 2010;Parbery-Clark et al, 2009b). To our knowledge, no single study has examined the effects of expertise with one instrument versus another on musically-relevant perceptual and cognitive performance; this would facilitate tests of experience-specific perceptual advantages alongside tests of cognitive outcomes that may relate to musical expertise, together with tests of perceptioncognition interactions.…”