14 DAY TRIAL // Teenagers around the world fighting their parents for a decent volume level on their stereos can now finally say that they have science on their side. New studies reveal that composing and playing music can be good for their hearing, in that they become more able to discern voices and speech out of noisy backgrounds. Apparently, making music has the interesting and beneficial side-effect of allowing musicians to hear better under “speech-in-noise,” where they have to understand what someone is telling them over background noises.
Researchers believe that musical training is directly responsible for this ability. “Speech-in-noise is challenging for everyone, but it’s especially challenging for older adults and children with learning disabilities. If we could establish that musical experience could help perception of speech-in-noise, that has all kinds of provocative implications in terms of encouraging policy-makers and parents to pursue musical education for their kids,” Northwestern University neuroscientist Nina Kraus, the co-author of the new study, published in this month's issue of the journal Ear and Hearing, says.
For the new experiments, 16 participants with musical training and 15 without were selected, and they were all subjected to two tests, in which they had to listen to sentences spoken by someone in a noisy environment. Their task was very simple – to listen to the words, and reproduce them as accurately as possible. The experts then created a threshold signal-to-noise ratio for each of the participants, based on the level of background noise and the number of correct words they identified.
“You’ve got an orchestra or a band, and you’re trying to hear the sound of your own instrument or trying to pull out a melody or bass line. There’s an analogy to that in listening to speech-in-noise, where what you’re trying to do is pull out a signal – the speaker’s voice – out of the many, many sounds that are going on around you,” Kraus explains the ability. Previous studies have already concluded that serious music training enhances brain regions related to encoding and processing sound, as well as portions of the cerebral cortex and the auditory brainstem.
“Older adults really do experience difficulty hearing speech-in-noise before there’s a hearing loss, often saying, ‘I can hear you, but I can’t understand what you’re saying.’ Wouldn’t it be nice if we could really establish that musical training even later in life could help protect older adults from the deleterious effects that seem to accompany aging?” Kraus concludes, quoted by Wired.