Music has, apparently, other effects on the brain as well, besides making people able to discern between good and bad sounds. According to researchers at the Northwestern University (NWU), being subjected to the influence of music from an early age makes young musicians more able to detect even the slightest nuances of emotions in the voice of the person they are talking to. The connection between the neurons of the brain themselves are altered, the experts say. The find is detailed in the latest issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience.

“Quickly and accurately identifying emotion in sound is a skill that translates across all arenas, whether in the predator-infested jungle or in the classroom, boardroom or bedroom,” the primary author of the new paper, Dana Strait, who is a Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music doctoral student, explains. She and Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory Director Nina Kraus, the Hugh Knowles professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology, have been studying the effects that music has on the brain of people, as well as the organ's “plasticity” when it comes to learning.

According to previous experiments carried out by Associate Professor of music cognition Richard Ashley, a trained musicians can detect subtle nuances of emotions in the voice of a person talking after only 50 milliseconds of hearing their voice. “Previous research has indicated that musicians demonstrate greater sensitivity to the nuances of emotion in speech,” he shares. “Scientists already know that emotion is carried less by the linguistic meaning of a word than by the way in which the sound is communicated,” Strait adds.

Over the course of the new set of experiments, volunteers including musicians and people with no skills in this field were asked to assess three main components in every sound, namely pitch, timing and timbre. These three elements are crucial to every sound, and most people recognize the voices of others by unconsciously analyzing them. It soon became obvious that musicians were far better at determining subtle changes in any of these elements, and did so way faster than control subjects.

“That their brains respond more quickly and accurately than the brains of non-musicians is something we'd expect to translate into the perception of emotion in other settings,” Strait explains. “It would not be a leap to suggest that children with language processing disorders may benefit from musical experience,” Kraus points out. The researchers even propose that music therapy be used as a means of promoting emotion processing in people suffering from autism and Asberger's syndrome.