Musicians have Superior Auditory Discrimination

Posted onAuthorCynthia K. Wunsch, M.M.Leave a comment

From a study by Brattico, Elvira, Pallesen, Karen Johanne, Varyagina, Olga, Bailey, Christopher, Anourova, Irina, Järvenpää, Miika, Eerola, Tuomas, and Tervaniemi, Mari: At the level of the auditory cortex, musicians discriminate pitch changes more accurately than nonmusicians. However, it is Read More …

Music Lessons Reorganize the Auditory Cortex

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From a study by Pantev C, Lappe C, Herholz SC, and Trainor L: Learning to play a musical instrument requires complex multimodal skills involving simultaneous perception of several sensory modalities: auditory, visual, and somatosensory as well as the motor system. Read More …

Speech and Music Link in Brain Proven

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Today’s study comes from Musacchia G, Sams M, Skoe E, and Kraus N: Musical training is known to modify cortical organization. Here, we show that such modifications extend to subcortical sensory structures and generalize to processing of speech. Musicians had Read More …

Practicing Music Reorganizes the Brain

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From a study by Riia Milovanova, Mari Tervaniemic, Fiia Takiob, and Heikki Hämäläinenb: (pdf file) To increase our understanding of the phonemic processing skills of musical and nonmusical subjects, the Dichotic Listening task was performed in children and adults with Read More …

Music Instruction Improves Vocabulary

Posted onAuthorCynthia K. Wunsch, M.M.Leave a comment

Thanks this time goes to Deric Bownds’ Mindblog, where Dr. Bownds is aggregating research, as I am. Dr. Bownds blogged about a study by Marie Forgeard, Ellen Winner, Andrea Norton, and Gottfried Schlaug: Children who received at least three years Read More …