Are musicians better listeners?

Abstract

An infrequently addressed consideration in psychoacoustics is whether to use musically trained listeners. Two groups of listeners (30 symphony professionals and 30+ nonmusicians) were tested under the same acoustic conditions with a variety of frequency‐discrimination tasks (isolated tones and complex patterns). The data reported will bear solely on initial performance levels. The following generalizations are based primarily on this study, but also include the results from training other listeners on the same tasks for longer periods: (a) On simple tasks, small initial differences were observable between music professionals and most nonmusicians. In some cases, nonmusicians were much poorer initially. (b) On complex tasks, the musicians performed better; the overlap between the two groups was much less for the complex task. Musical experience may be beneficial initially for more complicated attentional tasks. (c) Both groups of listeners can have much higher initial thresholds than those obtained from highly trained listeners. Among the advantages musicians bring to auditory tasks are that they may be: innately interested in hearing, more articulate and flexible in their listening strategies, and similar to experienced listeners at the start of an experiment. However, the advantages of musical training are often swamped by the further increase in performance that comes with lengthly training specific to the listening task.