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speech
, but they become completely addled if
their brains decide they are listening to
music
. When sound waves enter
your ear, how does the brain determine whether you are listening to
environmental noise, speech, or music? This question turns out to be
important for a variety of reasons. As we shall see later, people who have
lost speech abilities can often regain them through exposure to music. That
doesn’t happen if all they hear is the spoken word. How does that work?
What is the brain’s criteria for distinguishing music? Scientists don’t know.
We just know that the brain at some point seems to separate music from
speech.
However, it’s the purple section of our Venn diagram—the area where
the neurological processing domains for speech and music overlap—that is
most interesting to the question at hand. This overlap is the reason that
music training affects aspects of speech: if you improve one, you can also
improve the other.
Music lessons improve social skills
What else can music training do—besides, of course, make people better
musicians? Watch the jazz band the Pat Metheny Group play “Have You
Heard” live, and you may get an idea.
Pat Metheny is a bushy-haired American jazz guitarist and composer,
winner of 19 Grammy Awards. He has been making records since the mid-
1970s. I saw a video of him performing live in Japan in 1995, and the
group’s improvisatory prowess was on full display. Besides the joyous
virtuoso performance, the impression that strikes me most is the almost
ridiculous cooperation of the band. There are five saxes, five trumpets, two
vocalists, a string bass, keyboards, several rhythm sections, and probably a
bunch of people I can’t see. There is plenty of room for error, yet that is
exactly what you don’t hear. The musicians switch off performing solos
throughout the song, tossing around melodies like Frisbees, and yet they
play as one person. They don’t even have to look at each other—they can’t,
in fact; the stage is mostly dark. The musicians signal to each other using
the subtle nonverbal cues so legendary in jazz performance, creating
musical dialogues only seasoned musicians can make intelligible. It is
exhilarating, magical stuff.
How do they achieve such coordination? Is there something about
performing in a musical group that trains people to look for subtle cues in
others, in the service of coordinating a goal-oriented activity? Behavior
done for the good of a group, or for the good of another individual, is
termed “prosocial.” The action could be as exotic as allowing another
musician solo space in a jazz concert so that he or she may shine, or it could
be as mundane as making dinner when your spouse is sick. Prosocial skills,
you can imagine, profoundly influence a person’s social abilities in all
aspects of life.
Does music training confer social, not just cognitive, benefits? You
don’t have to be good enough to play in Mr. Metheny’s band to know that is
exactly what one finds. The research we’ll look at next spans the age
spectrum from adults to infants.
Musicians are better at detecting emotion
If you’ve ever cried because you were yelled at, you know: words
convey emotions. You can find out
what
somebody is feeling by detecting
how
they are saying something. We call such abilities “vocal affective
discrimination skills.” Researchers asked: How good are trained musicians
at these skills compared to nonmusicians?
In one study, English-speaking musicians and nonmusicians heard
various emotions expressed in Tagalog, a Philippine language that was
foreign to them. They were asked to identify any emotion they heard. How
good were they at detecting the emotional information in what was being
said, even though they could not understand the words? The results were
dramatic. Trained musicians were champs, while nonmusicians were
surprisingly bad at it. Musicians were especially good at discerning sadness
and fear. They actually scored higher when listening to Tagalog than when
listening to their native English! Studies like these laid the groundwork for
demonstrating that music might improve social skills.
Another research effort involved college-age students who had received
musical training for 10-plus years. The researchers eavesdropped on the
students’ brain activity using noninvasive imaging technologies while
playing various auditory cues. They were specifically interested in the
students’ brain stems—the primal, most evolutionarily ancient parts of our
brains. What exactly were their brains doing as they listened to the audio
cues, compared to the brains of nonmusicians?
Consistent with previous findings, the researchers found that the
musicians outpaced the nonmusicians in discriminating emotional
information. These undergraduates were especially good at detecting subtle
changes in the sound, timing, and pitch of a
baby’s
cry, for heaven’s sake.
(Getting this right can be enormously difficult to do.) We call such talents
fine-grained discrimination. Extending the previous findings, the
researchers showed that musicians’ brain stems were more efficient at this
neural-processing task. Specifically, their brains exhibited increased time-
domain responses to complex emotional information. Their
brains
, not just
their behaviors, were better.
Much research remains to be done, however. It’s unclear whether music
training directly improves this ability, or whether people who are naturally
better at fine-grained discrimination have a tendency to like music and stick
with music lessons.
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