Speech intelligibility in noise: A comparative study of musicians, audio-engineers, and non-musicians

Miśkiewicz A, Szczepanowska K. Speech intelligibility in noise: A comparative study of musicians, audio-engineers, and non-musicians. In: Express Paper. Audio Engineering Society; 2025.pp. 325:1-. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22876

@inproceedings{Miskiewicz2025_22876,
  author = {Miśkiewicz, Andrzej and Szczepanowska, Karolina},
  title = {{Speech intelligibility in noise: A comparative study of musicians, audio-engineers, and non-musicians}},
  pages = {325:1-},
  year = {2025},
  month = may,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22876}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Speech intelligibility in noise: A comparative study of musicians, audio-engineers, and non-musicians
AU  - Miśkiewicz, Andrzej
AU  - Szczepanowska, Karolina
SP  - 1
M1  - Paper 325
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/05/12
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22876
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Published studies indicate that musicians outperform non-musicians in a variety of non-musical auditory tasks, a phenomenon known as the musicians hearing advantage effect. One widely reported benefit is enhanced speech-in-noise (SIN) recognition. It was observed that musicians speech-in-noise (SIN) recognition thresholds (SRTs) are lower than those of non-musicians, though findingsmainly from English-language studiesare mixed; some confirm these advantage, while others do not. This study extends SRT measurements to Polish, a language with distinct phonetic characteristics. Participants completed a Polish speech intelligibility test, reconstructing sentences masked by multitalker babble noise by selecting words from a list displayed on a computer screen. Speech levels remained constant while masking noise was adjusted adaptively: increasing after each correct response and decreasing after each error. Three groups were tested: musicians, musically trained audio engineers, and non-musicians. Results showed that musicians and audio engineers had SRTs 2 and 2.7 dB lower than non-musicians, respectively. Although audio engineers exhibited slightly lower SRTs than musicians, the difference was minimal, with statistical significance just above the conventional 5% threshold. Thus, under these conditions, no clear advantage of audio engineers over musicians in SIN performance was observed.
ER  -