Musicians Show Improved Speech Segregation in Competitive, Multi-Talker Cocktail Party Scenarios

Abstract

Studies suggest that long-term music experience enhances the brain's ability to segregate speech from noise. Musicians' "speech-in-noise (SIN) benefit" is based largely on perception from simple figure-ground tasks rather than competitive, multi-talker scenarios that offer realistic spatial cues for segregation and engage binaural processing. We aimed to investigate whether musicians show perceptual advantages in cocktail party speech segregation in a competitive, multi-talker environment. We used the coordinate response measure (CRM) paradigm to measure speech recognition and localization performance in musicians vs. non-musicians in a simulated 3D cocktail party environment conducted in an anechoic chamber. Speech was delivered through a 16-channel speaker array distributed around the horizontal soundfield surrounding the listener. Participants recalled the color, number, and perceived location of target callsign sentences. We manipulated task difficulty by varying the number of additional maskers presented at other spatial locations in the horizontal soundfield (0-1-2-3-4-6-8 multi-talkers). Musicians obtained faster and better speech recognition amidst up to around eight simultaneous talkers and showed less noise-related decline in performance with increasing interferers than their non-musician peers. Correlations revealed associations between listeners' years of musical training and CRM recognition and working memory. However, better working memory correlated with better speech streaming. Basic (QuickSIN) but not more complex (speech streaming) SIN processing was still predicted by music training after controlling for working memory. Our findings confirm a relationship between musicianship and naturalistic cocktail party speech streaming but also suggest that cognitive factors at least partially drive musicians' SIN advantage.

Keywords: acoustic scene analysis; experience-dependent plasticity; musical training; speech-in-noise perception; stream segregation.

FIGURE 1

Cocktail party streaming task. (A) Participants were seated in the center of a 16-channel speaker array within an anechoic chamber. Speaker heights were positioned at ear level (∼130 cm) during the task with a radial distance of 160 cm to the center of the head and speaker-to-speaker distance of ∼20°. (B) Example stimulus presentation (three- and six-talker conditions). Participants were asked to recall the color, number, and perceived location of target callsign sentences from the coordinate response measure (CRM) corpus (Bolia et al., 2000). Target location was varied randomly from trial to trial and occurred simultaneous with between zero and eight concurrent masking talkers.

FIGURE 2

Cocktail party listening is superior in musicians. (A) Speech recognition declines with increasing masker counts in both groups, but musicians show less performance decrement up to eight interfering talkers (inset). Dotted line = chance performance. (B) Musicians show faster (∼200–400 ms) speech recognition speeds than non-musicians. (C) Both groups localized correctly identified targets within two speakers (<40° error) with better localization in musicians. Error bars = ± 1 s.e.m.

FIGURE 3

Cognitive skills are superior in musicians. (A) Raven’s fluid IQ and (B) auditory working memory are enhanced in musicians. (C) Musicians also obtain ∼1 dB lower reception thresholds on the QuickSIN test, consistent with the notion of a musician advantage in speech-in-noise (SIN) perception. No group differences were observed in sustained attention (data not shown). Error bars = ± 1 s.e.m. *p < 0.05, ****p < 0.0001.

FIGURE 4

Correlation results. (A) Formal music training predicts musicians’ perceptual–cognitive advantages in working memory (WM) and speech streaming at the cocktail party. More extensive music training is associated with better auditory WM and shallower masker-related declines in speech streaming (see Figure 2A, inset). (B) Speech streaming is also related to WM; higher WM capacity predicts better cocktail party performance.