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Music-In-Noise Task average score vs. (A) Fine pitch discrimination ability, and (B) auditory working memory (AWM) performance. Only musicians and non-musicians are included in this illustration in order to visually emphasize group differences.
Source publication
The ability to segregate target sounds in noisy backgrounds is relevant both to neuroscience and to clinical applications. Recent research suggests that hearing-in-noise (HIN) problems are solved using combinations of sub-skills that are applied according to task demand and information availability. While evidence is accumulating for a musician adv...
Citations
... The Music-in-Noise Task (MINT) will be used to measure inter-individual differences in hearing-in-noise skills [109]. MINT is utilized as a measure of higher-level musical skills. ...
... The MINT uses a match-mismatch trial design, whereby participants first listen to a short instrumental excerpt presented in "multi-music" noise, followed by either a matched or scrambled version of the excerpt presented in silence, and are asked to judge whether the two excerpts are the same. The MINT includes five listening conditions, of which we will utilize three (Baseline, Rhythm, and Prediction [reversed order]), which differ according to the presence or absence of different types of contextual cues, which have been shown to be differentially sensitive to musical and linguistic expertise [109]. The Baseline condition provides no additional cues. ...
Background
Unaddressed age-related hearing loss is highly prevalent among older adults, typified by negative consequences for speech-in-noise perception and psychosocial wellbeing. There is promising evidence that group singing may enhance speech-in-noise perception and psychosocial wellbeing. However, there is a lack of robust evidence, primarily due to the literature being based on small sample sizes, single site studies, and a lack of randomized controlled trials. Hence, to address these concerns, this SingWell Project study utilizes an appropriately powered sample size, multisite, randomized controlled trial approach, with a robust preplanned statistical analysis.
Objective
To explore if group singing may improve speech-in-noise perception and psychosocial wellbeing for older adults with unaddressed hearing loss.
Methods
We designed an international, multisite, randomized controlled trial to explore the benefits of group singing for adults aged 60 years and older with unaddressed hearing loss (registered at clinicaltrials.gov, ID: NCT06580847). After undergoing an eligibility screening process and completing an information and consent form, we intend to recruit 210 participants that will be randomly assigned to either group singing or an audiobook club (control group) intervention for a training period of 12-weeks. The study has multiple timepoints for testing, that are broadly categorized as macro (i.e., pre- and post-measures across the 12-weeks), or micro timepoints (i.e., pre- and post-measures across a weekly training session). Macro measures include behavioural measures of speech and music perception, and psychosocial questionnaires. Micro measures include psychosocial questionnaires and heart-rate variability.
Hypotheses
We hypothesize that group singing may be effective at improving speech perception and psychosocial outcomes for adults aged 60 years and older with unaddressed hearing loss—more so than participants in the control group.
... Others have failed to find such an effect (Boebinger et al., 2015;Ruggles et al., 2014;Madsen et al., 2017Madsen et al., , 2019. Recent studies have also shown that musicians outperformed nonmusicians in segregating melody targets within a background of multi-music streams (Coffey et al., 2019;Hsieh et al., 2022). These findings highlight the importance of music-related factors in SIN processing and emphasize the need for effective strategies to enhance speech perception in challenging listening environments. ...
... The selection of these levels was empirically determined to guarantee that these levels captured the range of performance while avoiding the ceiling effect for normal-hearing young Mandarin adults. The noise was a multi-music masker generated by adding four polyphonic music streams (Coffey et al., 2019). The noise selection was determined in a pilot study using spectrum analysis of target and maskers. ...
Using songs to facilitate speech processing in noisy environments seems appealing and practical. However, current research suggests otherwise, possibly due to the simplicity of sung speech contours. This study investigates the effects of contour tonality on sung speech intelligibility in noisy environments. A cohort of 20 trained musicians and 20 nonmusicians were tested on the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences sung on tonal, atonal, and fixed-pitch melodies or normally spoken under three signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs: −3, −6, and −9 dB). Perceptual musical skills related to speech-in-noise perception were also assessed. Results showed that overall speech-in-noise intelligibility decreased as the SNR decreased, with spoken speech being more intelligible than sung speech. Sung speech intelligibility was higher for fixed- than variable-pitch contours, with no difference between tonal and atonal melodies. No musician advantage was reported for spoken speech. Musicians, nonetheless, outperformed nonmusicians in identifying sung speech across all melodic contour types. Moreover, the musician sung speech advantage correlated with enhanced music perception abilities on pitch and accent. These results suggest that musicians have an advantage in sung speech in noisy environments. However, melody tonality provided no additional benefits, suggesting that imposing tonality on sung speech does not improve speech perception in noisy environments.
... To eliminate linguistic influences and evaluate different auditory sub-skills in stream segregation, Coffey et al. (2019) introduced the Music-in-noise task (MINT). MINT expands measures beyond speech perception by incorporating a melodic line as the target, enabling the examination of selective listening of musical phrases amidst a mix of musical sounds that provides informational masking. ...
... MINT expands measures beyond speech perception by incorporating a melodic line as the target, enabling the examination of selective listening of musical phrases amidst a mix of musical sounds that provides informational masking. By employing simple melodies as the target signal, MINT allows for the disentanglement of the relative contributions of top-down processes and the systematic integration of rhythmic, visual, spatial attentional and predictive cues, which have been shown to be crucial in stream segregation (Slater & Kraus, 2016;Coffey et al., 2019). ...
... ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.10.24.619127 doi: bioRxiv preprint self-reported information regarding overall musical experience (instruments played, total cumulative practice hours), language proficiency, basic demographics, etc. The testing session began with an audiometry hearing test, followed by the two behavioural tasks: the AWM task (Albouy et al., 2017), and the MINT task (Coffey, 2019); see the following section for descriptions. The visual component of each task was presented on a computer screen and sounds were presented binaurally through headphones (ATH-M50x, Audio-Technica). ...
This study investigates the interactions between musicianship and two auditory cognitive mechanisms: auditory working memory (AWM) and stream segregation. The primary hypothesis is that AWM mediates the relationship between musical training and enhanced stream segregation capabilities. Two groups of listeners were tested, the first to establish the relationship between the two variables and the second to replicate the effect in an independent sample. Music history and behavioural data were collected from a total of 145 healthy young adults with normal binaural hearing. They performed a task that requires manipulation of tonal patterns in working memory, and the Music-in-Noise Task (MINT), which measures stream segregation abilities in a musical context. The MINT task expands measurements beyond traditional Speech-in-Noise (SIN) assessments by capturing auditory subskills (e.g., rhythm, visual, spatial, prediction) relevant to stream segregation. Our results showed that musical training is associated with enhanced AWM and MINT task performance, and that this effect is replicable across independent samples. Moreover, we found in both samples that the enhancement of stream segregation was largely mediated by AWM capacity. The results suggest that musical training and/or aptitude enhances music-in-noise perception by way of improved AWM capacity.
... The Music-In-Noise Task (MINT; Coffey et al., 2019) was used to test the patient's auditory stream segregation abilities in a musical context. In the MINT task, each trial contains two melodies, which can be either identical or different from each other. ...
... For the MBEA , the pitch discrimination test (Sun et al., 2017), the tonality test (Peretz et al., 2008), and the rhythm discrimination test (Grahn & Brett, 2009), a headphone was used to deliver the stimuli at a comfortable sound level adjusted by MM. For the MINT (Coffey et al., 2019), SMRT (Aronoff & Landsberger, 2013), and AuSTIN (Dawson et al., 2013) tests, two loudspeakers were used considering MM's left-side hearing loss and the fact that the stimuli of these tests can be different from the left and right channels. These stimuli were presented at 65 dB as measured with a sound-level meter from the patient's listening position. ...
... MM's MINT average score was 61% which was equivalent to the 20 th percentile based on the norm reported by Coffey et al. (2019). As shown in Figure 3c, MM scored at the chance level (Kaplan et al., 1983). ...
A 62-year-old musician-MM-developed amusia after a right middle-cerebral-artery infarction. Initially, MM showed melodic deficits while discriminating pitch-related differences in melodies, musical memory problems, and impaired sensitivity to tonal structures, but normal pitch discrimination and spectral resolution thresholds, and normal cognitive and language abilities. His rhythmic processing was intact when pitch variations were removed. After 3 months, MM showed a large improvement in his sensitivity to tonality, but persistent melodic deficits and a decline in perceiving the metric structure of rhythmic sequences. We also found visual cues aided melodic processing, which is novel and beneficial for future rehabilitation practice.
... This study revealed a musician advantage in a colocated SPIN task, where the speech and the masker were delivered from the same loudspeaker positioned directly in front of the child. These findings align with at least a couple of previous studies with adults (Coffey et al., 2019;Parbery-Clark et al., 2009). However, findings differ from previous studies with children and adults in which differences between musicians and nonmusicians arose only in spatially separated conditions (i.e., speech and masker delivered from different locations) and not colocated conditions Swaminathan et al., 2015). ...
... Finally, bilingualism has been previously linked to reduced SPIN skills in children and adults when participants are tested in their second language (Krizman et al., 2017;Lucks Mendel & Widner, 2016;Schmidtke, 2016). However, in some cases, SPIN skills are actually enhanced when multilingual participants are tested in their primary language relative to monolingual participants (Coffey et al., 2019). Although we confirmed that English was the primary language for all children in our cohort, we do not know whether other languages were spoken at home or in school. ...
Purpose
The objective of this study was to evaluate whether child musicians are better at listening to speech in noise (SPIN) than nonmusicians of the same age. In addition, we aimed to explore whether the musician SPIN advantage in children was related to general intelligence (IQ).
Method
Fifty-one children aged 8.2–11.8 years and with different levels of music training participated in the study. A between-group design and correlational analyses were used to determine differences in SPIN skills as they relate to music training. IQ was used as a covariate to explore the relationship between intelligence and SPIN ability.
Results
More years of music training were associated with better SPIN skills than fewer years of music training. Furthermore, this difference in SPIN skills remained even when accounting for IQ. These results were found at the group level and also when years of instrument training was treated as a continuous variable (i.e., correlational analyses).
Conclusions
We confirmed results from previous studies in which child musicians outperformed nonmusicians in SPIN skills. We also showed that this effect was not related to differences in IQ between the musicians and nonmusicians for this cohort of children. However, confirmation of this finding with a cohort of children from more diverse socioeconomic statuses and cognitive profiles is warranted.
... A musician advantage has been reported under different types of background noise, such as speech-spectrum noise or multiple talkers [9][10][11][12][13][14] , and when speech and noise were presented from the same spatial location or in a naturalistic 3D environment [15][16][17][18] . In addition to speech materials, Coffey et al. 19 demonstrated that musicians outperformed non-musicians in identifying a target melody embedded in a noise background of multi-melodies. On the other hand, several studies reported that musicians and non-musicians were equally adept at identifying target sentences when embedded in different types of modulated maskers 20 , separated by fundamental frequency differences from noise streams 21 or spatially separated with speech maskers 22,23 . ...
... Quasi-AP proficiency facilitates the use of spatial but not visual cues during segregation. An enhanced ability to use visuo-spatial cues has been reported to underlie the previously observed musician advantage in HIN perception, with some suggestions that visuo-spatial cues may increase streaming ability by drawing attention to target streams 19,40,41 . Hence, we examined whether quasi-AP proficiency might facilitate the use of visuo-spatial cues during HIN perception, and whether performance differs by HIN task domain. ...
... Auditory working memory of tonal but not linguistic materials is associated with music-in-noise performance. Some studies suggest that superior AWM performance correlates with better SIN performance 19,38 ; thus, we also tested the relationship between AWM abilities and HIN performance. Previous assessment of AWM abilities has mostly used linguistic measures (phonological/digit span); thus, we examined the relevance of linguistic and non-linguistic (tonal) AWM information to HIN perception. ...
Recent evidence suggests that musicians may have an advantage over non-musicians in perceiving speech against noisy backgrounds. Previously, musicians have been compared as a homogenous group, despite demonstrated heterogeneity, which may contribute to discrepancies between studies. Here, we investigated whether “quasi”-absolute pitch (AP) proficiency, viewed as a general trait that varies across a spectrum, accounts for the musician advantage in hearing-in-noise (HIN) performance, irrespective of whether the streams are speech or musical sounds. A cohort of 12 non-musicians and 42 trained musicians stratified into high, medium, or low AP proficiency identified speech or melody targets masked in noise (speech-shaped, multi-talker, and multi-music) under four signal-to-noise ratios (0, − 3, − 6, and − 9 dB). Cognitive abilities associated with HIN benefits, including auditory working memory and use of visuo-spatial cues, were assessed. AP proficiency was verified against pitch adjustment and relative pitch tasks. We found a domain-specific effect on HIN perception: quasi-AP abilities were related to improved perception of melody but not speech targets in noise. The quasi-AP advantage extended to tonal working memory and the use of spatial cues, but only during melodic stream segregation. Overall, the results do not support the putative musician advantage in speech-in-noise perception, but suggest a quasi-AP advantage in perceiving music under noisy environments.
... Previous studies probing the cocktail party effect with regard to music have used instrumental melodies (Ekström & Borg, 2011) or synthetic "music-shaped noise" (Eskridge et al., 2012) maskers. The Music-In-Noise Task (Coffey et al., 2019) uses multi-instrumental maskers and melodic targets as an analogue to speech recognition in multitalker babble. Though Music-In-Noise Task performance correlates with speechin-noise listening abilities, it uses different musical cues (e.g., rhythm, melodic prediction) to measure nonlinguistic auditory stream segregation. ...
"Cocktail party" speech perception is largely studied using either linguistic or nonspeech noise maskers. Few studies have addressed how listeners understand speech during concurrent music. We used popular songs to probe the effects of familiarity and different inherent properties of background music (i.e., isolated vocals, isolated instruments, or unprocessed song) on speech recognition. Participants performed an open-set sentence recognition task in the presence of familiar and unfamiliar music maskers (-5 dB signal-to-noise ratio [SNR]) composed of the full unprocessed song, only the instrumentals, or only the vocals. We found that full songs negatively affected recognition performance more so than isolated vocals and instrumentals. Surprisingly, there was also an interaction with music familiarity; well-known music impaired performance in the homologous full song and instrumental conditions. Our results show strong effects of song component and familiarity on speech recognition ability, highlighting interactions between both physical and psychological characteristics of musical noise on task performance. Familiarity impairs speech perception when background music features the instrumentals with or without the vocals. Our findings have implications for understanding the possible facilitation (or interference) of background music during concurrent linguistic tasks including academic study in attempts to promote learning.
... Yet relatively little research has tested auditory scene analysis abilities under realistic musical conditions. Coffey et al. (2019) presented a music-in-noise task that had listeners hear out musical target melodies and rhythms from a masker signal consisting of four unrelated polyphonic music pieces artificially mixed together, but the ecological validity of this approach remains constrained. In addition, there is a scarcity of scene analysis research that reaches beyond young normal-hearing test participants. ...
Auditory scene analysis is an elementary aspect of music perception, yet only little research has scrutinized auditory scene analysis under realistic musical conditions with diverse samples of listeners. This study probed the ability of younger normal-hearing listeners and older hearing-aid users in tracking individual musical voices or lines in JS Bach's The Art of the Fugue. Five-second excerpts with homogeneous or heterogenous instrumentation of 2–4 musical voices were presented from spatially separated loudspeakers and preceded by a short cue for signaling the target voice. Listeners tracked the cued voice and detected whether an amplitude modulation was imposed on the cued voice or a distractor voice. Results indicated superior performance of young normal-hearing listeners compared to older hearing-aid users. Performance was generally better in conditions with fewer voices. For young normal-hearing listeners, there was interaction between the number of voices and the instrumentation: performance degraded less drastically with an increase in the number of voices for timbrally heterogeneous mixtures compared to homogeneous mixtures. Older hearing-aid users generally showed smaller effects of the number of voices and instrumentation, but no interaction between the two factors. Moreover, tracking performance of older hearing aid users did not differ when these participants did or did not wear hearing aids. These results shed light on the role of timbral differentiation in musical scene analysis and suggest reduced musical scene analysis abilities of older hearing-impaired listeners in a realistic musical scenario.
... This task is intended to measure auditory segregation ability in the context of musical excerpts. Musicians outperformed non-musicians in the original study of the task, and years of music (minimum of 2 years) training predicted task performance [112]. However, no studies to our knowledge have examined the effects of short-term music training on the MINT. ...
... Hearing-in-noise abilities were assessed with the Music-In-Noise Task (MINT) [112] and the Bench, Kowal, and Bamford Sentences test (BKB-SIN) [123]. In the MINT, participants were presented with a musical excerpt embedded within musical noise, followed by a matching or non-matching repetition of the target excerpt in silence and are asked to determine whether the two presented sounds matched. ...
Perceiving speech in noise (SIN) is important for health and well-being and decreases with age. Musicians show improved speech-in-noise abilities and reduced age-related auditory decline, yet it is unclear whether short term music engagement has similar effects. In this randomized control trial we used a pre-post design to investigate whether a 12-week music intervention in adults aged 50-65 without prior music training and with subjective hearing loss improves well-being, speech-in-noise abilities, and auditory encoding and voluntary attention as indexed by auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) in a syllable-in-noise task, and later AEPs in an oddball task. Age and gender-matched adults were randomized to a choir or control group. Choir participants sang in a 2-hr ensemble with 1-hr home vocal training weekly; controls listened to a 3-hr playlist weekly, attended concerts, and socialized online with fellow participants. From pre- to post-intervention, no differences between groups were observed on quantitative measures of well-being or behavioral speech-in-noise abilities. In the choir group, but not the control group, changes in the N1 component were observed for the syllable-in-noise task, with increased N1 amplitude in the passive condition and decreased N1 latency in the active condition. During the oddball task, larger N1 amplitudes to the frequent standard stimuli were also observed in the choir but not control group from pre to post intervention. Findings have implications for the potential role of music training to improve sound encoding in individuals who are in the vulnerable age range and at risk of auditory decline.
... Taking a finer grained look at the time courses of the reconstruction, we find that the majority of information about the attended stream comes from two broad peaks in the neural representation, centred at approximately 40 and 120 ms (no clear above-chance peaks are observed in the unattended stream and in the entire sound stream). These results are generally consistent with the time courses observed previously using speech stimuli (i.e., stories; Puschmann et al., 2018) and provide further evidence that the same neural mechanisms are likely employed in this music-based task as in speech-based tasks (see also Coffey, Arseneau-Bruneau et al., 2019). However, as compared with previous results, the pattern of Figure 7. Enhancement of attended stream differs across frequency bands. ...
... Its design does not allow us to attribute enhancements separately to the spatial, visual, and predictive cues offered, nor to explore differences between the effectiveness with which people can take advantage of different cues. Behavioural tasks such as the Music-In-Noise Task (MINT) can be used to further study how integrating information across neural systems results in improved performance, the benefits of which can differ according to one's experience with sound-MINT results differed according to musical and linguistic experience (Coffey, Arseneau-Bruneau et al., 2019) and correlated with results from well-used languagebased task (Nilsson et al., 1994). Our results also support the use of instrumental musical stimuli, which are devoid of linguistic cues and can be easily manipulated to alter their informational content while holding acoustic features constant. ...
Hearing-in-noise (HIN) perception is a challenging task that is critical to human function – but how the brain accomplishes it is not well understood. A candidate mechanism proposes that the neural representation of an attended auditory stream is enhanced relative to background sound via a combination of bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. To date, few studies have compared neural representation and its task-related enhancement across frequency bands that carry different auditory information, such as a sound’s amplitude envelope (i.e. syllabic rate or rhythm; 1-9Hz), and the fundamental frequency of periodic stimuli (i.e. pitch; >40Hz). Furthermore, HIN in the real world is frequently both messier and richer than the majority of tasks used in its study. In the present study, we use continuous sound excerpts that simultaneously offer predictive, visual, and spatial cues to help listeners separate the target from four acoustically similar simultaneously presented sound streams. We show that while both lower and higher-frequency information about the entire sound stream is represented in the brain’s response, the to-be-attended sound stream is strongly enhanced only in the slower, lower frequency sound representations. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that attended sound representations are strengthened progressively at higher-level, later processing stages, and that the interaction of multiple brain systems can aid in this process. Our findings contribute to our understanding of auditory stream separation in difficult, naturalistic listening conditions, and demonstrate that pitch and envelope information can be decoded from single-channel EEG data.
