Short-Term Choir Singing Supports Speech-in-Noise Perception and Neural Pitch Strength in Older Adults With Age-Related Hearing Loss

Abstract

Prior studies have demonstrated musicianship enhancements of various aspects of auditory and cognitive processing in older adults, but musical training has rarely been examined as an intervention for mitigating age-related declines in these abilities. The current study investigates whether 10 weeks of choir participation can improve aspects of auditory processing in older adults, particularly speech-in-noise (SIN) perception. A choir-singing group and an age- and audiometrically-matched do-nothing control group underwent pre- and post-testing over a 10-week period. Linear mixed effects modeling in a regression analysis showed that choir participants demonstrated improvements in speech-in-noise perception, pitch discrimination ability, and the strength of the neural representation of speech fundamental frequency. Choir participants’ gains in SIN perception were mediated by improvements in pitch discrimination, which was in turn predicted by the strength of the neural representation of speech stimuli (FFR), suggesting improvements in pitch processing as a possible mechanism for this SIN perceptual improvement. These findings support the hypothesis that short-term choir participation is an effective intervention for mitigating age-related hearing losses.

Neurophysiological improvements in speech-in-noise task after short-term choir training in older adults

“…Groups did not differ in pre- to post-training improvements of sentence-in-noise tasks during or outside EEG recording. This is in contrast to experimental evidence demonstrating benefits in behavioral speech-in-noise abilities after 10 weeks of choir training [ 68 ] and 6 months of piano training [ 69 ], both in older adults. However, with the same group of participants, [ 108 ] did not observe behavioral differences in an in-scanner task of hearing in noise.…”

“…However, with the same group of participants, [ 108 ] did not observe behavioral differences in an in-scanner task of hearing in noise. Differences between observed behavioral speech-in-noise improvements and the results of this study may reflect differences in tasks [ 68 ] used the QuickSIN [ 109 , 110 ], which consists of sentences embedded in 4-talker babble. Comparison of QuickSIN and BKB-SIN, as used in this study, show greater differences between groups of differing hearing abilities in QuickSIN as compared to BKB-SIN, a difference associated with increased contextual cues present in the BKB-SIN that lead to better recognition in individuals with greater hearing loss [ 111 ].…”

“…Children aged 6-9 with prelingual moderate-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss showed advantages in sentence-in-noise ability as compared to a passive control group after 12 weeks of music training [ 67 ]. In older adults, individuals randomly assigned to choir participation outperformed a passive control group on a sentence-in-noise task after 10 weeks of training [ 68 ]. In this study, participants assigned to the choir group additionally demonstrated enhanced neural representation to temporal-fine structure of auditory stimuli related to speech (i.e.…”

Can You Hear Out the Melody? Testing Musical Scene Perception in Young Normal-Hearing and Older Hearing-Impaired Listeners

“…Musicians outperform nonmusicians in an attentive tracking experiment ( Madsen et al., 2019 ), and musicians appear to be better aware of ambiguity in ASA ( Pelofi et al., 2017 ). Studies have even observed musical training to positively affect the ability to understand speech in noise ( Dubinsky et al., 2019 ; Parbery-Clark et al., 2009 ; Puschmann et al., 2018 ; Slater et al., 2015 ; Zendel et al., 2019 ), although there is debate regarding the robustness of the effect ( Boebinger et al., 2015 ; Madsen et al., 2019 ; Ruggles et al., 2014 ). Seeking to obtain a first estimate of NH and HI listeners’ performance in musical scene analysis tasks, we here used a task that required listeners to focus their attention on a target instrument playing a short tone sequence and to separate the contributions of the target and masker signals even for low target levels.…”

Autodidacticism and Music: Do Self-Taught Musicians Exhibit the Same Auditory Processing Advantages as Formally Trained Musicians?

“…These enhancements are associated with both functional and structural differences in the brains of musicians compared to non-musicians (Kraus and Chandrasekaran, 2010;Herholz and Zatorre, 2012). Longitudinal studies have confirmed that at least some of these advantages are due to music training and not pre-existing auditory advantages (Fujioka et al, 2006;Lappe et al, 2008Lappe et al, , 2011Tierney et al, 2015;Dubinsky et al, 2019;Fleming et al, 2019;Zendel et al, 2019). One commonality between both the cross-sectional and longitudinal research is that musicians and those that are given music training as part of research are trained formally.…”