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. Seventy-seven older adults aged 60 to 90 years were recruited and divided into two groups based on their lifetime musical experience: the group without musical experience (n = 39) and the M group (with musical experience; n = 38). Participants in the M group had either played an instrument for 5 years or more and/or taken at least 1 year of music lessons. Following a hearing screening and a musical experience questionnaire, participants completed two music perception tasks: (1) a short version of the Montreal Battery Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) measuring melodic (scale and contour) and rhythm perception, and (2) an instrument discrimination task measuring timbre perception.

Results: Results revealed that participants of the M group had a significantly higher accuracy in both tasks compared with the group without musical experience while controlling for age and hearing loss. Moreover, a significant interaction was found between group effect and hearing loss for the MBEA, suggesting that musical experience moderates the impact of hearing loss on melodic and rhythm perception abilities. Finally, the amount of musical experience was the most important positive predictor for MBEA accuracy in the M group.

Conclusions: These results suggest that despite age-related hearing loss, older adults with musical experience still benefit from their experience-driven enhancement in melodic, rhythm, and timbre perception. Findings from this study support the notion that music training is beneficial for music perception abilities, providing protection against the impact of presbycusis.