Playing Music Helps Brain Function
Scientists have uncovered that playing music enhances the brain and sharpens hearing for all kinds of sounds, including speech. “Experience with music appears to help with many other things in life. Activities like reading or picking up nuances in tones of voices or hearing sounds in a noisy classroom,” says researcher Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University.
Experiments were conducted with 20 adult, movie-watching volunteers. As they watched movies, they also listened to Mandarin words that sounded like “mi” continuously at conversation level in the background. Mandarin is a tone language, where a single word can differ in meaning depending on its tone. For example, the Mandarin word “mi” means “to squint” when delivered in a level tone, “to bewilder” when spoken in a rising tone, and “rice” when given in a falling then rising tone.
The researchers recorded neural responses. Half the volunteers had at least six years of training in a musical instrument, starting before the age of 12. The others had no more than three years of musical experience. All were native English speakers who had no knowledge of Mandarin. “Even with their attention focused on the movie, we found our musically trained subjects were far better at tracking the three different tones than the non-musicians,” said neuroscientist Patrick Wong at Northwestern University.
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