Hear Res
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, 1131 E. 2nd Street, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, United States.
Published: September 2024
Musicians perform better than non-musicians on a variety of non-musical sound-perception tasks. Whether that musicians' advantage extends to spatial hearing is a topic of increasing interest. Here we investigated one facet of that topic by assessing musicians' and non-musicians' sensitivity to the two primary cues to sound-source location on the horizontal plane: interaural-level-differences (ILDs) and interaural-time-differences (ITDs). Specifically, we measured discrimination thresholds for ILDs at 4 kHz (n =246) and ITDs at 0.5 kHz (n = 137) in participants whose musical-training histories covered a wide range of lengths, onsets, and offsets. For ILD discrimination, when only musical-training length was considered in the analysis, no musicians' advantage was apparent. However, when thresholds were compared between subgroups of non-musicians (<2 years of training) and extreme musicians (≥10 years of training, started ≤ age 7, still playing) a musicians' advantage emerged. Threshold comparisons between the extreme musicians and other subgroups of highly trained musicians (≥10 years of training) further indicated that the advantage required both starting young and continuing to play. In addition, the advantage was larger in males than in females, by some measures, and was not evident in an assessment of learning. For ITD discrimination, in contrast to ILD discrimination, parallel analyses revealed no apparent musicians' advantage. The results suggest that musicianship is associated with greater sensitivity to ILDs, a fundamental sound-localization cue, even though that sensitivity is not central to music, that this musicians' advantage arises, at least in part, from nurture, and that it is governed by a neural substrate where ILDs are processed separately from, and more malleably than, ITDs.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2024.109078 | DOI Listing |
Ann N Y Acad Sci
January 2025
Department of Neuropsychology and Psychopharmacology, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
People enjoy engaging with music. Live music concerts provide an excellent option to investigate real-world music experiences, and at the same time, use neurophysiological synchrony to assess dynamic engagement. In the current study, we assessed engagement in a live concert setting using synchrony of cardiorespiratory measures, comparing inter-subject, stimulus-response, correlation, and phase coherence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEar Hear
November 2024
Department of Speech Language Pathology & Audiology, Towson University, Towson, Maryland, USA.
Objectives: Musicians face an increased risk of hearing loss due to prolonged and repetitive exposure to high-noise levels. Detecting early signs of hearing loss, which are subtle and often elusive to traditional clinical tests like pure-tone audiometry, is essential. The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of noise exposure on the electrophysiological and perceptual aspects of subclinical hearing damage in young musicians with normal audiometric thresholds.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCogn Sci
December 2024
Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, BCL.
In this paper, we explore the effect of musical expertise on whistled word perception by naive listeners. In whistled words of nontonal languages, vowels are transposed to relatively stable pitches, while consonants are translated into pitch movements or interruptions. Previous behavioral studies have demonstrated that naive listeners can categorize isolated consonants, vowels, and words well over chance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain Lang
October 2023
Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Electronic address:
The perception of multiple-speaker speech is challenging. People with music training generally show more robust and faster tone perception. The present study investigated whether music training experience can facilitate tonal-language speakers to accommodate speech variability in lexical tones.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnn N Y Acad Sci
November 2024
CERVO Brain Research Center, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.
Despite the ubiquity of musical activities, little is known about the specificity of their association with executive functions. In this cross-sectional study, we examined this relationship as a function of age. Our main hypotheses were that executive functions would decline in older age, that this relationship would be reduced in singers and instrumentalists compared to nonmusician active controls, and that the amount of musical experience would be more strongly associated with executive functions compared to the specific type of activity.
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