Music Perception in Older Adults With Hearing Loss: Protective Effect of Musical Experience.

Objectives: The goal of this project was to investigate the impact of musical experience, hearing loss, and age on music perception in older adults. The authors hypothesized that older adults with a varying degree of musical experience would perform better at music perception tasks than their counterparts without musical experience while controlling for age and hearing loss.

Design: This study used a descriptive correlational cross-sectional design.

Octave illusion: stimulation frequencies can modulate perception.

The octave illusion (Deutsch, 1974) is a well-known auditory illusion elicited by presenting a dichotic sequence of two tones separated by an octave during which the high and low tones alternate between both ears. This illusion engages an important mechanism of auditory perception, which is pitch perception. Previous studies used central frequencies of the useful musical spectrum to elicit the illusion.