Musicians Attention to Detail

Real-world listening situations provide many distractions whether it is a whisper between friends in the back of the classroom, the blaring siren of police cars driving by or an argument going on outside your door. Thousands of pieces of information enter our brain every hour, so it is a remarkable feat for our brain to be able to discriminate which pieces of information are the most important to pay attention to. When a listener is able to process a bunch of different sources of sound at the same time, they are synthetically integrating the stimuli, however when a listener is able to distinguish one sound or frequency from the others, they are said to be processing the info analytically.

Dr. Dye lectured about precisely this ability of listeners to segregate specific target pieces of information from information contained within distracters. He called this the stimulus-classification procedure. In his experiment, two signals of different frequencies were presented, and one was identified as the target signal (the sound the listener was to pay attention to) and the distracter signal. The two signals were also distributed at different angles from the midline of the body, so that interaural differences in time, or the time it takes for sound to reach one ear before the other, would vary and the brain would need to interpret the target info and distracter info as separate stimuli. The research found that some individuals were able to create distinct representations in the brain for the two signals while the vast majority weighed the two signals but still only formed one representation. Oftentimes, the individuals attended to the higher frequency regardless of which one was the target or distracter.

The discussion at the end of Dr. Dye’s lecture regarding a musician’s potential ability to better attend to different frequencies of sounds really intrigued me, having played the violin for 10 years, so I did some research. It turns out that musicians really can discriminate between different auditory stimuli better than non-musicians. The Kraus lab at Northwestern performed an EEG study and found that musicians had better auditory attention scores than non-musician counterparts when listening to various sources of speech. The main difference presented in the musicians’ prefrontal cortex. This makes sense because the prefrontal cortex is often associated with attention and control. It’s also interesting that the longer the individual had been a musician, the larger the response of the prefrontal cortex. This particular study had focused on an aging population, whose ability to distinguish between multiple auditory stimuli has typically started to decline. Age-related decline was combated in musicians. But perhaps this information can have an impact on the methods treatment of ADD and ADHD children, rather than just influencing adults behaviors. Playing music might alter the prefrontal cortexes of these youth and therefore influence their capabilities to pay attention in other activities in their life. I would also be very interested to see the EEG patterns of attention in musicians to various musical instruments compared to that of speech. I imagine for the type of instrument that that particular musician plays, there would be a more fine tuned or stronger response than other instruments. 

Being able to attend to different auditory stimuli can be helpful for a multitude of people; students might better be able to focus in school, sports players might hear each other over the sounds of the stadium and ground crew at airports might be hear orders more accurately over the sound of airplane engines. So perhaps, in the coming years more individuals will choose to pick up an instrument in their spare time. 

Dye, R., Stellmack, M. and Jurcin, N. (2005). “Observer weighting strategies in interaural time-difference discrimination and monaural level discrimination for a multi-tone complex.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 117(5), 4079-3090.

Ojiaku, P. "Please Pay Attention to the Notes." Scientific American. July 2011. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-with-moxie/2011/07/11/please-pay-attention-to-the-notes/