A potential transfer-of-training advantage musicians may have in speech perception remains an elusive topic. Our recent research on musician effect on speech perception (Başkent, D., and Gaudrain, E., 2016, Musician advantage for speech-on-speech perception, JASA-EL 139, EL51-EL56) has shown a strong musician effect for speech on speech perception (single target talker and single masker talker). We had also manipulated the difference in the voices of the masker and target speech, as we suspected the root of musician effect to be better perception of voice cues.  This idea, however, did not seem to hold, leading to many more questions on where this advantage may be coming from.

This research is now featured at a fun Scientific American podcast:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/bring-a-musician-to-untangle-cocktail-party-din/