Psychophysical auditory filter estimates reveal sharper cochlear tuning in musicians

Abstract

Musicianship confers enhancements to hearing at nearly all levels of the auditory system from periphery to percept. Musicians' superior psychophysical abilities are particularly evident in spectral discrimination and noise-degraded listening tasks, achieving higher perceptual sensitivity than their nonmusician peers. Greater spectral acuity implies that musicianship may increase auditory filter selectivity. This hypothesis was directly tested by measuring both forward- and simultaneous-masked psychophysical tuning curves. Sharper filter tuning (i.e., higher Q10) was observed in musicians compared to nonmusicians. Findings suggest musicians' pervasive listening benefits may be facilitated, in part, by superior spectral processing/decomposition as early as the auditory periphery.

Musicians have enhanced audiovisual multisensory binding: experience-dependent effects in the double-flash illusion

“…These results extend prior work demonstrating auditory-specific enhancements in musicians (Bidelman and Krishnan 2010;Kraus and Chandrasekaran 2010;Strait et al 2010;Bidelman et al 2014a) by revealing a multimodal component to music's benefits on brain function. They further extend recent work on musicianship and multisensory integration for speech and musical stimuli (Musacchia et al 2007;Noppeney 2011, 2014;Paraskevopoulos et al 2012) to domain-general stimuli.…”

Influence of musical training on sensitivity to temporal fine structure

“…However, research on sharper cochlear tuning for musicians is currently inconclusive. Earlier studies show no change in the auditory fi lter bandwidth of musicians (Fine & Moore, 1993;Oxenham et al, 2003), but a recent study claimed to fi nd a difference in fi lter shape between musicians and non-musicians (Bidelman et al, 2014), suggesting that narrower fi lters might play a role in the TFS task. Notably, the fi ndings by Bidelman et al (2014) was for Western-musicians.…”

Unraveling the Biology of Auditory Learning: A Cognitive–Sensorimotor–Reward Framework

“…Musicians process sound more efficiently even when not playing music, suggesting that repeated active engagement with sound shapes the automatic state of the nervous system [19]. In fact, the imprint of music training extends all the way the outer hair cells of the cochlea [44, 45]. The musician model also demonstrates that sensory input alone is insufficient to drive neural remodeling: comparisons between children undergoing active music training (that engages cognitive, motor, and reward networks) and those in music appreciation classes have shown neurophysiological changes only in the former [46].…”