‘Scientists demonstrate that musicians are better at understanding speakers in noisy environments’ in a study co-authored by Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
‘In the study, published in the September issue of Neuroscience, 25 musicians and 25 non-musicians between the ages of 18 and 32 were asked to don headphones and listen to sentences embedded in babble produced by four different speakers. The participants were then required to recall the sentences, and were scored according to their accuracy.
The scientists found that musicians performed consistently better than non-musicians, correctly recalling the sentences much more frequently despite the ruckus audible in the background of the recording.
Moreover, by attaching electrodes to the participant’s scalps, Kraus’ team demonstrated that an adult musician’s brain is much better at keeping neural responses distinct. This allows musicians to discriminate between similar sounds and to understand a speaker even against a noisy backdrop.’
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