Musically talented in Conversation

“Yesterday I was going ou-”

“…and I was driving and then I start hea-”

“…the Oscars...they incorrectly announced La La”-

"Timothy!!! You just spil-"

The above passage attempts to recreate the chaos one experiences at parties. The chatter, laughter, and music all seem to mesh together in these environments. In fact, it’s almost a wonder how people are able to carry on their own conversations despite all of the distractions surrounding them. This phenomenon is known as the cocktail party problem. The cocktail party problem is the ability of being able to focus auditory attention on a specific stimulus and ignore all other stimuli: this effect is what allows party goers to focus on a single conversation in noisy rooms. While we all possess the ability to focus on a single voice and tune out all others, in the research paper titled “Musical training, individual differences and the cocktail party,” researchers analyze whether musicians are more equipped and better able to understand speech in noisy environments than non-musicians. A musician’s lifelong musical training (which includes discerning between subtle sounds such as pitch, timing, and timbre) cultivates their cognitive abilities and enhances their auditory attention and working memory. Similarly to music, speech perception relies on “detailed auditory analysis operating in concert with working memory and auditory attention.” Thus, researchers found that musicians performed significantly better than non-musicians when emulating the cocktail party problem.

Like the cognitive processes utilized when discerning voices and conversations at parties, musicians are required to differentiate between instruments and voices during musical performances. This similarity is the basis for the belief that musical appreciation can assist children with language based learning disabilities. Based in Los Angeles, the Harmony Project is a music program that offers at least five hours of musical lessons to students coming from low income backgrounds. The project serves demographics that have high illiteracy rates and low graduation rates. Partnering up with the Harmony Project, Northwestern University Neurobiologist Dr. Nina Kraus is investigating how being immersed in a musical environment and learning to play music affects reading comprehension. Knowing that musically talented individuals have greater success at hearing speech in noise, Dr. Kraus explains the connection between sound and reading stating, “Well there’s a connection with sound and reading in that when you’re learning to read you need to connect the sounds of words that you’ve heard for many years with the symbol on the page. So you’re making a sound to meaning connection.”

To measure the effects of musical training on hearing speech in noise, Dr. Kraus’ team looked at ways participants’ brain responses in areas critical for reading and learning differed over the course of the program. Students were asked to repeat back sentences presented to them in noisy environments. Kraus found that students with greater musical training had the ability to respond more precisely to meaningful elements in language. Thus, students with greater training repeated sentences more accurately than students with less training. Kraus notes that these positive changes associated with musical training can be useful in the classroom environment where students must listen to a teacher’s voice and absorb the information being presented in a noisy classroom. Both Kraus’ findings and the findings reported in the article “Musical training, individual differences and the cocktail party” implicate that musical experience strengthens cognitive processes critical for perceiving meaningful signals in noisy environments. These findings are just the beginning to understanding how humans discern speech. Difficulty hearing is unavoidable and plagues all, however, gaining a greater understanding of auditory attention can help researchers improve cochlear implants and understand the mechanisms involved in children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.

References

National Science Foundation - Where Discoveries Begin. (n.d.). Retrieved March 01, 2017, from https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=115958’

Project gives young brains the benefits of musical training. (n.d.). Retrieved March 01, 2017, from http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education-jan-june14-harmony_01-04/

Swaminathan, J., Mason, C. R., Streeter, T. M., Best, V., Kidd, J. G., & Patel, A. D. (2015). Erratum: Musical training, individual differences and the cocktail party problem. Scientific Reports,5, 14401. doi:10.1038/srep14401

Image: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9913518/Cocktail-party-problem-explained-how-the-brain-filters-out-unwanted-voices.html