Musician Hearing Enhancement: Where and When it Occurs?

Numerous studies suggest that musical training develops not only musical hearing abilities, but also enhances various non-musical auditory skills. The advantage of musicians over non-musicians in auditory tasks not related to music has been known as the musician hearing enhancement (MHE) effect. This paper argues that the occurrence of MHE and the degree to which the MHE effect is pronounced depend on the mode of listening, a concept representing the subject's listening strategy, related to the purpose of listening and the type of sounds being listened to. The modes of listening have been divided into three categories in the literature: (1) the causal mode, focused on auditory orientation in the environment, (2) the reduced mode, focused on extracting the meanings conveyed by the sounds by means of a certain code, (3) the semantic mode aimed at the perception of the inherent sonic characteristics with no connotations to any sound sources. Recent studies of the recognition of environmental sound sources suggest that the MHE effect, largely evidenced in auditory tasks based upon reduced and semantic listening, is much less pronounced in the causal mode of listening.