Musicians have an advantage on a spatial-hearing task only when they are highly trained, start training early, and continue to play

•Interaural differences in time (ITDs) and level (ILDs) are sound-localization cues.•There is a musicians’ advantage for ILD, but not for ITD, discrimination.•The musicians’ advantage for ILD requires early, extensive, and ongoing training.•Requirements imply the advantage for ILD has a sensitive period and is perishable.•The factors responsible for the advantage likely act on an ILD-specific pathway. Musicians perform better than non-musicians on a variety of non-musical sound-perception tasks. Whether that musicians’ advantage extends to spatial hearing is a topic of increasing interest. Here we investigated one facet of that topic by assessing musicians’ and non-musicians’ sensitivity to the two primary cues to sound-source location on the horizontal plane: interaural-level-differences (ILDs) and interaural-time-differences (ITDs). Specifically, we measured discrimination thresholds for ILDs at 4 kHz (n =246) and ITDs at 0.5 kHz (n = 137) in participants whose musical-training histories covered a wide range of lengths, onsets, and offsets. For ILD discrimination, when only musical-training length was considered in the analysis, no musicians’ advantage was apparent. However, when thresholds were compared between subgroups of non-musicians (