Category: Music

The effect of musical training on language skills and the brain’s response to sound.

Musical training — even when started as late as high school — sharpens skills critical to academic success, new research finds.

Teenagers had sharper hearing and language skills after musical training, the psychologists concluded.

Benefits were seen after the adolescents took group music classes.

Professor Nina Kraus, who led the study, said:

“While music programs are often the first to be cut when the school budget is tight, these results highlight music’s place in the high school curriculum.

Although learning to play music does not teach skills that seem directly relevant to most careers, the results suggest that music may engender what educators refer to as ‘learning to learn.'”

The conclusions come from a study which followed 40 adolescents from before they entered high school until three years later.

Around half started band classes while the rest joined the junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC).

Those taking the band classes had three hours of group instruction per week in school.

Electrical activity in their brains was measured before and afterwards.

The musical group showed more rapid maturation in the brain’s response to sound.

They also had better language skills than those who had joined the ROTC.

The authors conclude:

“Our results support the notion that the adolescent brain remains receptive to training, underscoring the importance of enrichment during the teenage years.”

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Tierney et al., 2015).

Listening to music image from Shutterstock

This type of training boosts the brain’s language centres in young and old.

Musical training in younger years can protect the brain from normal age-related decay of language skills, a new study finds.

Adults who had received musical training as youngsters were 20% faster at identifying speech sounds than non-musicians, neuroscientists have discovered.

Age has detrimental effects on many areas of cognitive function: one of these is that older people find it more difficult to understand speech, despite often having no measurable hearing loss.

This is because the part of the brain that processes speech gets weaker in later years.

In this study, though, adults who had started musical training before the age of 14 and continued for up to 10 years showed better functioning in this part of the brain.

Dr Gavin Bidelman, who led the study, said:

“Musical activities are an engaging form of cognitive brain training and we are now seeing robust evidence of brain plasticity from musical training not just in younger brains, but in older brains too.”

In the study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, 20 healthy adults aged between 55 and 75 listened to random speech sounds, like ‘ooo’ and ‘ahhh’ (Bidelman & Alain, 2015).

While some of the sounds were obviously either an ‘ooo’ or an ‘ahhh’, others were mixed together to make them more difficult to identify.

During testing, the electrical activity in the brain was measured as people tried to identify the sounds.

Dr Bidelman said:

“In our study we were able to predict how well older people classify or identify speech using EEG imaging.

We saw a brain-behaviour response that was two to three times better in the older musicians compared to non-musicians peers.

In other words, old musicians’ brains provide a much more detailed, clean and accurate depiction of the speech signal, which is likely why they are much more sensitive and better at understanding speech.”

Man listening image from Shutterstock

Research reveals which types of music improve which types of athletic performance.

Listening to jazz can improve your performance on the putting green, according to a new study.

And jazz is not the only music that’s been linked to athletic performance, as one of the study’s authors Dr. Ali Boolani explains:

“Other research has shown that country music improves batting, rap music improves jump shots and running is improved by any up-tempo music.

But the benefit of music in fine motor control situations was relatively unknown.

Hopefully, this is the first step in answering this question.”

In the small experiment, 20 good golfers tried five different putts while listening to one of the following types of music:

• Classical
• Country
• Rock
• Jazz
• Hip hop/rap
• No music

The results, published in the Journal of Athletic Enhancement, found that any music at all improved putting compared with none, but jazz was the best genre (Baghurst et al., 2014).

So, why does jazz improve putting?

First, here is the authors’ more creative answer:

“…jazz is derived from improvisation, which appears in similar arts such as the theatre.

Although speculative, listening to jazz may encourage greater improvisation from the listener.

Thus, participants in the present study may have better observed the grain and slope of the green and were more open to creativity in the putt.”

Cute answer, but their second explanation is probably more accurate:

“…jazz serves to act as a calming effect, as opposed to other genres which generally have higher tempos and could increase levels of arousal.”

Image credit: flyzipper

Brain regions that process language are also involved in communicating through music.

When jazz musicians are improvising, the areas of the brain activated include those associated with syntax and spoken language, a new brain imaging study finds.

The study had jazz musicians ‘trading fours’: which is where musicians each improvise four bars of music (Donnay et al., 2014).

Typically, trading fours is like a conversation. Each player picks up the themes of the other and elaborates, changes or ‘replies’ in some way.

This suggests that trading fours is more than just a metaphorical conversation, it activates the same areas of the brain involved in building sentences.

A fascinating nuance of the study was that although areas associated with syntax were activated, the areas of the brain associated with the meaning of language showed lower activation.

One of the study’s authors, Charles Limb, explained:

“We’ve shown in this study that there is a fundamental difference between how meaning is processed by the brain for music and language. Specifically, it’s syntactic and not semantic processing that is key to this type of musical communication. Meanwhile, conventional notions of semantics may not apply to musical processing by the brain.”

To reach these conclusions, the Johns Hopkins researchers recruited 11 men who were highly proficient jazz piano players.

One musician lay inside the fMRI machine with a plastic piano and traded fours with another for ten minutes.

All the while the fMRI machine measured the brain’s activity.

Limb continued:

“When two jazz musicians seem lost in thought while trading fours, they aren’t simply waiting for their turn to play. Instead, they are using the syntactic areas of their brain to process what they are hearing so they can respond by playing a new series of notes that hasn’t previously been composed or practiced.”

Image credit: Professor Bop

Beauty is processed in part of the reward circuit of the brain, a new study finds.

Although mathematics might not seem a source of beauty comparable to the wonders of nature, elegant formulas can be very beautiful to mathematicians.

A new study by neuroscientists at University College London, showed mathematicians a series of equations they had previously rated on a beauty scale (Zeki et al., 2014).

The study’s lead author, Semir Zeki explained:

“The beauty of a formula may result from simplicity, symmetry, elegance or the expression of an immutable truth. For Plato, the abstract quality of mathematics expressed the ultimate pinnacle of beauty.”

Here is an equation consistently rated as beautiful, which is called ‘Euler’s identity’:

What they found from the fMRI scans was that when mathematicians looked at the beautiful equations, the same part of the brain was activated as when people are looking at beautiful art or listening to beautiful music.

The brain area–in the medial orbitofrontal cortex–is at the front of the brain and is part of the pleasure and reward circuit.

A previous study has shown that this area of the brain is more highly activated when people listen to beautiful music or look at beautiful art (Ishizu & Zeki, 2011).

In contrast, when they look at ugly pictures, their brain activity shows no particular pattern.

Now this study shows the same is true for mathematics, which is generally much more abstract then music or painting.

Neuroaesthetics

This supports the idea in the emerging field of ‘neuroaesthetics’ that the experience of beauty is processed in one particular part of the brain, whether it is perceived through the eyes, ears or in more abstract ways: through the intellect.

Not only that, but the more beautiful the formula, the stronger the activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, suggesting that beauty can be quantified.

Zeki added:

“We have found that, as with the experience of visual or musical beauty, the activity in the brain is strongly related to how intense people declare their experience of beauty to be–even in this example where the source of beauty is extremely abstract.”

Image credit: Scott Beale

At some point during the evening, in bars across the land, two things happens: the lights go down and the music goes up.

Lowering the lights signals the real beginning of night-time fun: with dimmed lights and alcohol beginning to work its magic the business of loosening up after the day’s exertions can truly begin.

Continue reading “Why Loud Music in Bars Increases Alcohol Consumption”

What strategies do you use to make yourself feel better, increase your energy levels and reduce your tension? That’s the question Robert Thayer and colleagues at California State University were motivated by in looking for the strategies people use and find effective (Thayer, Newman & McClain, 1994). There’s no revelations in the results but the fact that the same three main strategies were useful in changing mood and reducing tension and raising energy speaks volumes:

Continue reading “How to Improve Mood, Raise Energy and Reduce Tension”

Seeing a band live is a much more engaging experience than listening to a recording at home. But it’s not just the atmosphere of a live event, it’s also the singer’s facial expressions and gestures which enhances our emotional experience.

It’s a rare singer whose face remains impassive as they sing. Think of jazz greats like Ella Fitzgerald, blues artists like B. B. King or pop acts like Michael Jackson. As they sing, their faces are conveying the emotion in the music, sometimes it seems, even struggling with the emotions. Part of the beauty of a live performance is seeing singers’ faces as they interact with both the music, the other musicians and the audience. Their facial expressions often seem part of the music itself.

Continue reading “Music + Body Language = More Excitement”

Back in March I asked for your help with some research on music and personality I was carrying out with my colleagues. Although it was restricted to people living in the UK, there was a healthy response to the online questionnaire. Joy of joys, there were also some interesting results, so I thought I would update you with how it turned out.

Continue reading “Older and Musically Wiser?”