Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Knowles Hearing Center, Northwestern University Institute for Neuroscience, 2240 Campus Drive, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 60208, United States.
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, 1131 E. 2nd Street, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85721, United States.
Hear Res. 2024 Sep 15;451:109078. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2024.109078. Epub 2024 Jul 10.
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.
音乐家在各种非音乐声音感知任务上的表现优于非音乐家。音乐家的优势是否扩展到空间听觉是一个越来越受到关注的话题。在这里，我们通过评估音乐家和非音乐家对水平面上声源位置的两个主要线索的敏感性来研究这个话题的一个方面：耳间水平差异（ILDs）和耳间时间差异（ITDs）。具体来说，我们测量了在音乐训练历史涵盖广泛长度、开始和结束的参与者中，4 kHz 处的 ILD 辨别阈值（n=246）和 0.5 kHz 处的 ITD 辨别阈值（n=137）。对于 ILD 辨别，当仅在分析中考虑音乐训练长度时，没有明显的音乐家优势。然而，当在非音乐家（<2 年的训练）和极端音乐家（≥10 年的训练，开始年龄≤7 岁，仍在演奏）的子组之间比较阈值时，出现了音乐家的优势。极端音乐家与其他高训练音乐家（≥10 年的训练）的子组之间的阈值比较进一步表明，这种优势需要年轻时开始并继续演奏。此外，在某些方面，男性的优势大于女性，而且在学习评估中并不明显。对于 ITD 辨别，与 ILD 辨别相反，平行分析显示没有明显的音乐家优势。结果表明，音乐家身份与对 ILD 的更高敏感性相关，ILD 是基本的声音定位线索，尽管这种敏感性不是音乐的核心，但这种音乐家的优势至少部分来自后天培养，并且受到一个神经基质的控制，在该基质中，ILDs 与 ITDs 分开处理，并且更具可变性。
