摘要Background:Musical perception requires a host of skills.Instrumental musicians place greater emphasis on motor coordination,whereas vocal musicians rehearse vocal sounds.The study explored the differ-ential advantages of musical background on binaural integration and interaction in musicians(in-strumentalists,vocalists)and compared them with age-matched non-musicians.Methods:Eight six participants aged 20-40 y with normal hearing sensitivity were subjected to binaural tests using a standard group comparison research design.The participants were segregated into three groups-Group 1 included instrumentalists(n=26,mean age:17.73±2.83 y),while Group 2 and Group 3 consisted of vocalists(n=30,mean age:19.30±2.47 y)and non-musicians(n=30,mean age:18.20±3.02 y)respectively.The binaural processes namely integration(Dichotic syllable test,DST;and virtual acoustic space identification-VASI)and interaction(Interaural difference thresholds for time and level:ITD & ILD),were administered on all the participants.Results:Statistical analyses showed the main effect of musicianship.Bonferroni pair-wise test revealed that the musicians(instrumentalists and vocalists)outperformed(p＜0.05)non-musicians in all the tests.The differential advantage of the musical background was seen on the binaural integration test with instrumentalists performing better in the VASI test compared to vocalists,and vice-versa for DST.No difference was observed in interaction tasks(ITD & ILD)between vocalists and instrumentalists(p＞0.05).Conclusion:Musical background-induced differential advantages can be reasonably noted in the binaural skills of instrumentalists and vocalists(compared to non-musicians).