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Category: Project

Description: Numerous studies have reported a link between engagement in musical training and enhanced neural processing and perception of sound, ranging from fine-grained pitch discrimination to the perception of speech in noise, with training-related neural changes emerging as early in the auditory pathways as the brainstem or even the cochlea. Such findings suggest a role for experience-dependent plasticity in the early auditory system, which may have meaningful perceptual consequences. However, the generalizability of the musician advantage remains unclear. For example, small-sized samples often represent extreme ends of the musical spectrum; the nature and magnitudes of the musician advantage are sometimes small or inconsistent; and comparisons between studies are complicated by methodological differences and varying analytical techniques. This multi-site study aims to examine the robustness of the musician advantage across the adult lifespan by replicating and extending eight key experiments involving both perception and neural coding across a large sample of listeners.