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. 2012 Nov 23:4:30.
doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2012.00030. eCollection 2012.

Musical experience strengthens the neural representation of sounds important for communication in middle-aged adults

Alexandra Parbery-Clark  1 , Samira Anderson, Emily Hittner, Nina Kraus
Affiliations

Musical experience strengthens the neural representation of sounds important for communication in middle-aged adults

Alexandra Parbery-Clark et al. Front Aging Neurosci. .

Abstract

Older adults frequently complain that while they can hear a person talking, they cannot understand what is being said; this difficulty is exacerbated by background noise. Peripheral hearing loss cannot fully account for this age-related decline in speech-in-noise ability, as declines in central processing also contribute to this problem. Given that musicians have enhanced speech-in-noise perception, we aimed to define the effects of musical experience on subcortical responses to speech and speech-in-noise perception in middle-aged adults. Results reveal that musicians have enhanced neural encoding of speech in quiet and noisy settings. Enhancements include faster neural response timing, higher neural response consistency, more robust encoding of speech harmonics, and greater neural precision. Taken together, we suggest that musical experience provides perceptual benefits in an aging population by strengthening the underlying neural pathways necessary for the accurate representation of important temporal and spectral features of sound.

Keywords: aging; auditory; brainstem; musical experience; musicians; speech in noise.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Stimulus waveform (A), spectrogram (B), and group average response (C) for the speech syllable /da/. The group average response plotted is the older musician response in quiet.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Average brainstem responses to /da/ in musician (red) and nonmusician (black) middle-aged adults in quiet (A) and noise (B). In quiet, musicians had earlier neural response timing for the onset and transition portion; in noise, musicians had earlier neural responses for the onset and transition, with a marginally significant trend for the vowel. ~p < 0.1, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Spectral encoding for the transition (A and C) and vowel (B and D) in quiet (A and B) and noise (C and D). Musicians (red) demonstrated enhanced spectral encoding for the vowel in both quiet and noise; nonmusicians (black) had greater F0 encoding in the transition in quiet only. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Envelope correlations between the stimulus (A) and the responses from the two conditions: quiet (B and C) and noise (D and E). The neural encoding of the stimulus envelope was greater in musicians (red) than nonmusicians (black) for both quiet and noise.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Relationships between speech-in-noise performance and brainstem response timing. Earlier neural response timing in the transition for both the quiet (A) and noise (B) conditions is associated with better hearing in noise. Similar relationships (not plotted here) were found for the neural response timing to the onset and the vowel; see text for more details. A lower, more negative speech-in-noise score is indicative of better performance.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Relationships between speech-in-noise performance and stimulus-to-response waveform (i.e., vowel) correlations. Better hearing in noise was associated with higher stimulus-to-response correlations in quiet (A) and noise (B), suggesting that greater precision in the brainstem's ability to represent the stimulus in both conditions is important for understanding speech in noise. A lower, more negative speech-in-noise score is indicative of better performance.
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