Page 16 - Summer 2010

THE MUSICIAN’S AUDITORY WORLD
Nina Kraus
Northwestern University Departments of Communication Sciences, Neurobiology and Physiology, Otolaryngology Evanston, Illinois 60208
Trent Nicol
Northwestern University Department of Communication Sciences Evanston, Illinois 60208
www.brainvolts.northwestern.edu
“Brainstem evoked responses to music and speech alike are rich sources in the investigation of music training’s role in shaping the nervous system.”
Introduction
Will listening to Radiohead
make you smarter? Probably
not. But according to noted
Internet data miner Virgil Griffith,1 the
typical Radiohead fan scores about 110
points higher on the Scholastic
Aptitude Test (SAT) than the typical
Grateful Dead fan (Fig. 1). Of course as
we all know, correlation does not equal
causation. But, to quote Aniruddh
Patel,2 music is a “transformative tech-
nology of the mind,” and we know that music does have a very real effect on skills outside the realm of air guitar. The quest to determine the mechanisms for this transference of musical skills has already begun.
In the Kraus lab at Northwestern University, the skills that interest us most are reading and speech-in-noise (SIN) perception. Significantly, musicians excel at these very activ- ities. Our research has led us to measuring deep-brain elec-
troencephalograph (EEG) in response to a variety of complex stimuli, and we have found correlates in this subcortical activity to reading and listening-in- noise skills. A logical step was to look at the interaction between SIN perception and reading and the changes in biology brought about by active engagement with music.
Background
Musicians’ special skills
As interesting as questions of musical taste and the con- sequences of favoring one sort of music over another might be, in this report, we will focus on active musical practice. The extent to which musicians are or are not better than their non-musician peers at a variety of tasks that has received considerable attention.
For example, it appears that musicians have particularly good verbal memory3,4 and auditory-attention skills5 but not
Fig. 1. Average SAT scores for college students who report a given artist or genre as a favorite. See musicthatmakesyoudumb.virgil.gr for additional data and an explanation of derivation. Reprinted with permission of author.
Musician’s Auditory World 15