A Domain Specific Hearing-in-Noise Performance is Associated With Absolute Pitch Proficiency

Created on 4th January 2022

Conference: The Asian Conference on Psychology & the Behavioral Sciences (ACP2022)
Title: A Domain Specific Hearing-in-Noise Performance is Associated With Absolute Pitch Proficiency
Stream: Linguistics/Language & Psychology/Behavioral Science
Presentation Type: Virtual Poster Presentation
Authors:
I-Hui Hsieh, National Central University, Taiwan
Hung-Chen Tseng, National Central University, Taiwan

Abstract:

Recent evidence suggests that musicians may confer an advantage over non-musicians at perceiving speech under noisy backgrounds. Previous research considers musicians as a homogeneous group, thus it remains unclear which aspect of musicianship contributes to musician enhancement. Here we investigate whether the degrees of absolute pitch proficiency can account for the musician advantage in hearing-in-noise (HIN) performance. A cohort of fifteen non-musicians and forty-five trained musicians divided into high, medium and low absolute-pitch proficiency groups identified a speech or melody target masked in noise (speech-shaped, multi-talker, and multi-music) under four signal-to-noise ratios (0, -3, -6, and -9 dB). Compatible HIN subtasks involving concurrent spatial, visual or prediction cues for melody and speech were also examined. Results showed that musicians outperformed non-musicians at perceiving melody, but not speech targets in noise. Both speech intelligibility and melody recognition scores declined with increasing signal-to-noise levels, with musicians more resilient to the effects of noise only for melodic streams. Musicians with higher absolute-pitch proficiency scored higher at identifying melodic, but not speech targets in noise. Relative to the baseline condition, the addition of spatial, not visual cue during stream segregation facilitated HIN performance only in the music domain. Collectively, these results suggest a domain specific form of hearing-in-noise perception that is mediated by proficiency of absolute-pitch ability. Our findings implicate that the hypothesis of long-term musical training leading to improved comprehension in complex noise backgrounds may be domain specific.