IF YOU struggle to follow the conversation at noisy parties, music lessons might help.
and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have previously shown that playing an instrument seems to enhance our ability to pick up emotional cues in conversation. Now her team has found differences in brain activity that they say make musicians better at picking out speech from background noise.
After establishing that , her team asked 16 lifelong musicians and 15 non-musicians to listen to speech in a quiet or noisy environment while they were wearing scalp electrodes to monitor their brain activity.
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Background noise delayed the brain鈥檚 response, but this delay was much shorter in the musicians. What鈥檚 more, in the noisy environment, the musicians鈥� brainwaves were more similar to the sound waves of the speech than in non-musicians (The Journal of Neuroscience, ).
The difference could be partly genetic, but Kraus says training is likely to help. 鈥淢usicians spend a lot of time extracting particular sounds from a soundscape.鈥�