Association between hearing loss but not age and mistuning perception in music

The enjoyment of music can be severely disrupted when instruments or voices are out of tune with each other. Both hearing loss and aging may degrade pitch perception, potentially affecting the ability to detect mistuning. For younger listeners with normal hearing, mistuning perception in music relies on both beats (amplitude fluctuations between closely spaced frequency components) and inharmonicity (non-integer frequency relationships between components from different sources). It is unknown whether the accuracy or nature of mistuning perception changes with age or hearing loss. To address this question, we tested groups of younger and older listeners with normal hearing and older listeners with hearing loss, as determined by their audiometric thresholds (N = 91 total). Results showed that older listeners with normal hearing performed similarly to younger listeners. In contrast, hearing loss was associated with poorer mistuning detection but was not associated with poorer performance in our measures of beat or inharmonicity detection. Reduction of either beating or inharmonicity cues in music had comparable effects across all groups. Overall, the results suggest that hearing loss, but not age, is associated with poorer mistuning detection in music, but that similar cues are used by all groups to detect mistuning.