Effects of Long-Term Musical Training on Cortical Auditory Evoked Potentials.
Carolyn J Brown, Eun-Kyung Jeon, Virginia Driscoll and 4 others
PMID 28225736WHAT IT FOUND
Adults with long-term musical training told apart small pitch and sound-quality changes better than non-musicians, and their brain responses to those changes were larger.
The study included adults described as normal hearing, not a training trial, so it does not prove music improves hearing.
Key findings
01Musicians scored better than non-musicians on speech understanding in noise and timbre recognition.
02Musicians had better pitch and spectral ripple discrimination than non-musicians.
03Musicians had larger brain responses to sound changes and better brain-response detection thresholds.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study compared people who already had long-term musical training with people who did not, so it cannot show that musical training caused the differences. Participants were adults described as normal hearing, not children or people using hearing aids or cochlear implants. The sample was small, and not all participants were tested at every difficult stimulus contrast. Some participants had mild high-frequency hearing loss, so the group was not uniformly normal hearing at all frequencies. The electrophysiologic measures were less sensitive than behavioral tests, required electrodes, and took a long time to obtain.
Declared interests
The article is tagged as Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural. The supplied text does not include a conflict-of-interest declaration or state that a sponsor designed or wrote the study.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that music training will improve auditory discrimination or speech in noise in patients. The study compared adults who already had long-term musical training with non-musicians, did not test a training program, and included adults described as normal hearing.