Musician Enhancement for Speech-In-Noise

Musical experience appears to enhance the ability to hear speech in challenging listening environments. Large group differences were found for QuickSIN, and the results also suggest that this enhancement is derived in part from musicians' enhanced working memory and frequency discrimination. For HINT, in which performance was not linked to frequency discrimination ability and was only moderately linked to working memory, musicians still performed significantly better than the nonmusicians. The group differences for HINT were evident in the most difficult condition in which the speech and noise were presented from the same location and not spatially segregated. Understanding which cognitive and psychoacoustic factors as well as which lifelong experiences contribute to SIN may lead to more effective remediation programs for clinical populations for whom SIN poses a particular perceptual challenge. These results provide further evidence for musical training transferring to nonmusical domains and highlight the importance of taking musical training into consideration when evaluating a person's SIN ability in a clinical setting.