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Description
Individual differences in music perception are shaped by peripheral sensory, cognitive, and experiential factors. The roles of hearing loss (HL) and ageing are particularly difficult to estimate because both are typically confounded in adult samples, leaving it unclear whether reduced musical perceptual performance reflects elevated hearing thresholds, age-related changes, or both. To disentangle HL from ageing, this ongoing study includes four listener groups: older normal-hearing (oNH; n = 31, M = 62.2 years), older hearing-impaired (oHI; n = 34, M = 67.8 years), younger normal-hearing (yNH; n = 26, M = 25.3 years), and younger hearing-impaired listeners (yHI; n = 14, M = 36.0 years). Participants completed a battery assessing Musical Scene Analysis, Melody Discrimination, Beat Alignment, Mistuning Perception, and Timbre Perception, alongside pure-tone audiometry and the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (GMS). Confirmatory factor analysis yielded a unidimensional General Musical Perception Score (GMPS), with the latent construct accounting for 40% of task variance. Ridge regression predicting GMPS from hearing thresholds, age, and GMS revealed that pure-tone average robustly predicted lower GMPS (β ≈ −.30, p < .001), while age contributed negligibly once hearing was controlled (β ≈ −.05, p = .583). GMS showed the largest effect (β ≈ .40, p < .001). Together, predictors explained ~45% of individual variance. These findings suggest that reduced musical perception in older adults is better explained by elevated hearing thresholds than by ageing per se. The strong contribution of musical training further highlights its potential role in supporting perceptual performance and compensating for HL-related constraints.