Musicians change their tune: how hearing loss alters the neural code.

People with sensorineural hearing loss are difficult to understand the conversation, especially in background noise. Even if hearing recovery is recovered by amplification, this defect still exists, suggesting that a mechanism beyond the decrease in peripheral sensitivity brings about perceived difficulties related to hearing loss. Considering that musicians that improve hearing improve their auditory perception skills including the perception of speech noise coupled with the subcortical response to speech, our goal is to have similar benefits for hearing-impaired middle-aged adults It is to judge whether it can be seen. The result shows that despite the self-awareness of understanding the average performance of speech in noise, hearing impaired musicians have a higher ability to hear noise than non musicians. This involves a more powerful subcortical encoding of the sound (eg, stimulus response correlation and reaction consistency) and a more elastic neural response to speech in the presence of background noise (eg, nerve timing). Hearing impaired musicians also show distinctive nerve characteristics compared to non-musician spectral coding. That is, it is improving the fundamental frequency of the speech sound, not the nerve encoding of the treble harmonic. This is in stark contrast to the previous results of regular listening musicians that enhanced the encoding of the harmonics but did not increase the encoding of the fundamental frequency. In summary, our data suggests that hearing loss changes the spectral coding of musicians' speech, but the perceived benefits of musicians in speech still exist by adaptively enhancing the potential neural mechanisms . Speech noise perception

Through measurement of the fidelity and response consistency of the stimulus response, middle-aged musicians with hearing impairment show more accurate speech neural coding in quiet and background noise. In addition, musicians have greater neural coding of the fundamental frequency and smaller neural timing delay with increased background noise. However, the benefits of musicians in spectral coding have not been found. Musicians take higher scores with speech noise and standardized measures of auditory working memory, but there is no self-assessment as noise sounds better than other musicians

Here we ask the musician whether the perception of speech in noise and the benefits of neural coding are consistent with hearing loss. In order to solve this problem, we evaluated auditory brainstem response in a quiet and noisy situation as well as standardized clinical trial and self-reported auditory noise ability. We analyzed into the accuracy of nerve timing, spectral coding, and neural coding (ie nerve fidelity and consistency), which used to be ordinary auditory children, young adults and middle-aged musicians with others I will concentrate. Non-musicians distinguish (Parbery) - Clark et al., 2009a, 2012a, b; Strait et al., 2012. And is known to decrease with age and hearing loss (Clinard et al., 2010; Vander Werff and Burns, 2011; Anderson et al., 2012). )