And, she says, these signals offer a more accurate representation of pitch, timing and tone quality - three things that help us pick out a single voice in a noisy room.Īnother study presented at Neuroscience 2009 suggests that musical training could help children who are struggling with language. Tests show that certain sounds produce stronger electrical signals in a musician's brain stem, Kraus says. "And resoundingly it does," she says.Ī closer look at musical brains may explain why. Kraus wanted to know whether this skill helps musicians pick out a particular voice the same way they pick out a particular instrument. "A musician will be listening to the sound of his own instrument even though many other instruments are playing," she says, a skill not unlike separating one voice from a crowd of voices. But Kraus knew that their brains, shaped by years of training, had become very good at a similar task: Standard hearing tests had shown that the musicians' ears weren't any more sensitive than those of the other listeners. So she tested their ability to do something challenging: understand what someone is saying in a noisy room.įifteen classically trained musicians and 16 nonmusicians listened to a voice reciting simple sentences against an increasingly loud backdrop of other conversations. Kraus figured that the hearing systems of musicians ought to be more finely tuned than those of other people. "Your hearing system becomes tuned by the experiences that you have had with sound throughout your life," Kraus says. ![]() That means your hearing can change even if your ears don't, says Nina Kraus, who directs the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. But they travel through the nervous system and get interpreted by the brain. But it's not because they have better ears. The studies found that serious musicians are better than other people at perceiving and remembering sounds. ![]() The study tested classically trained violinists and pianists, and found that their brains were much better adapted to discern subtle pitch and tonal differences in sound.
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