The Music-In-Noise-Task (MINT) Project

Older adults often report difficulty comprehending speech in noisy environments, or when the quality of sound is degraded, such as over a telephone line. This problem can be captured by playing sentences or words in background noise, and asking the listener what was heard. Large variations in performance exist even among people with normal hearing. This problem affects social interactions, and it is affected by diverse factors including language proficiency and musical training. 

New treatments are being developed to improve hearing-in-noise (HIN) perception using training. However, to make effective training, we must first understand which factors contribute the most to our global HIN perception. For example, in real life, we use visual and spatial cues to help separate a speaker's words from background noise, and we can fill in missing information with knowledge about the context. 

We first developed a task that measures how an individual relies on different cues when they are performing hearing-in-noise task. It uses musical stimuli, such that each cue can be clearly separated, and so as to avoid the effects of language proficiency. We validated it in a sample of healthy young adults (with and without musical training), and in collaboration with Dr. Li's lab, are collecting data on a sample of older adults. We have also collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data using a similar task, to better understand the neurological underpinnings of this important human behaviour. 

In the future, we would like to partner with stakeholders in the community to conduct studies on the most efficient and engaging ways to preserve and restore HIN function across the lifespan.