Informational Masking and Trained Listening
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Date
2009-06
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Informational masking occurs when a sound is more difficult to hear than we can predict by simply measuring the power in the sound and the power in the masking noise. It often occurs when one speech sound occurs in the presence of one or more competing speech sounds (Kidd, et al., 2008). Oxenham, et al, (2003) found that trained musicians seem to be less affected by informational masking than non-musicians. The hypothesis states that trained listeners in general, and not only musicians, are less susceptible to informational masking. For this study, listeners were divided into four groups. Group one was comprised of listeners with no formal musical training. Group two contained trained musicians who either studied or performed music at the college level but did not pass a musical interval recognition test. The third group consists of trained musicians who passed the interval test with a score of 90% or greater. The final group contained Morse code listeners with a code speed or twenty words per minute or greater. The maskers were eight component tone bursts. The first condition was the tone with no masker to determine the listener’s threshold in quiet. In the second condition the tone is played in a "twinkling masker." On each burst the masker tones change in frequency but the frequency of the target tone remains constant. This is called the multiple burst different (MBD) masking condition. In the third condition a multiple burst same masker (MBS) is used. Here eight tones selected for the first burst are repeated over the remaining seven bursts. This means that the frequency of the eight masking tones and the target remain constant. The level of the tone that can be detected in the MBS or MBD masker is the masked threshold. Generally, the masked threshold for the MBS condition is much higher than that for the MBD condition. The level of informational masking was found by finding the difference between the MBD and MBS masking conditions. The trained musicians who passed the interval test performed better on average than any other group on the informational masking task. The trained musicians who did not pass the interval task did slightly better than the control group. The Morse code listeners performed worse than the control group. This disproved the hypothesis that all trained listeners and not just musicians are less prone to informational masking.
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Keywords
Informational Masking, Trained Listening, Morse Code, Musicians