Page 66 - Fall2020

MUSIC TRAINING CHANGES THE BRAIN
tests assessed the children’s pitch processing in music and speech, reading skills, general intelligence, and memory abilities. The results demonstrated that children who received music training exhibited better pitch processing in music and in speech. Furthermore, musically trained children exhibited a significant decrease in the error rate in the reading skill task. However, no differences were observed in verbal and working memory tasks between the two training groups.
Moreno and colleagues (2011) conducted a second study on four- to six-year-old children focusing only on addressing the question of far-transfer effects (i.e., effects on general cognitive skills) with a shorter 4-week train- ing protocol. Vocabulary and executive functioning, such as the ability to inhibit distraction and switch attention, were used as measures. Moreno and colleagues found that only children with music training showed signifi- cant increases in vocabulary and performance on the executive function tasks, providing a strong argument for the far-transfer effects. Kraus and her colleagues (2014) designed a study that randomly assigned eight-year-old children into two groups. One group started an after- school music curriculum immediately after enrollment to the study while the other group started the same cur- riculum one year after enrollment in the study. Children’s auditory brainstem encoding of speech was measured repeatedly over the next few years. No difference was observed after the first year of the study, but after two years, the group with two years of training exhibited better encoding of speech than the group with only one year of training, suggesting the effect at the auditory brainstem takes prolonged training to manifest.
Following the previous studies with children, we exam- ined whether a short-term randomized controlled music intervention can affect infants’ neural processing of both music and speech (Zhao and Kuhl, 2016). Nine- month-old infants were randomly assigned to complete a 12-session laboratory-controlled music intervention or free play over a month period. The music intervention was social in nature, where groups of infants engaged in rhythmic activities such as clapping hands to musical beats with their caregivers. The control group engaged in everyday play activities, such as stacking building blocks, in the same environment but without music. The infants’ neural processing of music as well as speech rhythm was measured after one month. Indeed, infants who
completed the music intervention demonstrated better processing of both music rhythm and speech rhythm, demonstrating a transfer effect in infants as young as nine months of age (Figure 2). More importantly, using MEG, we were able to examine these effects in specific regions of the cortex. We again found that, in addition to the auditory region that is generally considered to be responsible for sound processing, enhanced neural activi- ties were also observed in the prefrontal regions, generally considered be responsible for higher cognitive skills, such as inhibitory and attentional control. This result was in line with our hypothesis that a higher level skill shared
Figure 2. Infants in both the intervention and control groups were measured in the magentoencephalography (MEG) machine after completing all intervention/play sessions (center inset). Their neural responses to occasional disruptions to music rhythm (left) and speech rhythm (right) are shown. The onset of the sound happens at time 0. Yellow bars: time window where the response to the disruptions are expected to happen. Top: neural responses in the auditory region (blue regions on the brain). Bottom: neural responses in the prefrontal region (red regions on the brain). Infants in the music intervention group showed enhanced responses in the auditory cortex (blue lines) as well as in the prefrontal region (red lines) compared with the control group (green and orange lines) for processing both music and speech rhythms.
66 Acoustics Today • Fall 2020