This study tested the hypothesis that the previously reported advantage of musicians over non-musicians in understanding speech in noise arises from more efficient or robust coding of periodic voiced speech, particularly in fluctuating backgrounds. Speech intelligibility was measured in listeners with extensive musical training, and in those with very little musical training or experience, usin...

In recent years, musicians have been increasingly recruited to investigate grey and white matter neuroplasticity induced by skill acquisition. The development of Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DT-MRI) has allowed more detailed investigation of white matter connections within the brain, addressing questions about the effect of musical training on connectivity between specific brain...

Musicians' perceptual advantage in the acoustic domain is well established. Recent studies show that musicians' verbal working memory is also superior. Additionally, some studies report that musicians' visuospatial skills are enhanced although others failed to find this enhancement. We now examined whether musicians' spatial vision is superior, and if so, whether this superiority reflects refin...

Musicians have lifelong experience parsing melodies from background harmonies, which can be considered a process analogous to speech perception in noise. To investigate the effect of musical experience on the neural representation of speech-in-noise, we compared subcortical neurophysiological responses to speech in quiet and noise in a group of highly trained musicians and nonmusician controls....

This presentation will show results from a study where pure tone audiometry was performed on 140 classical orchestral musicians in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was shown that female musicians had significantly better hearing thresholds in the high frequency area than the male musicians. Furthermore, the median pure tone hearing thresholds for the male musicians displayed a notch configuration at 6 kH...

We compared brain activation patterns between musicians and non-musicians (matched in performance score) while they performed a pitch memory task (using a sparse temporal sampling fMRI method). Both groups showed bilateral activation of the superior temporal, supramarginal, posterior middle and inferior frontal gyrus, and superior parietal lobe. Musicians showed more right temporal and supramar...

Neurocognitive studies have demonstrated that long-term music training enhances the processing of unattended sounds. It is not clear, however, whether music training also modulates rapid (within tens of minutes) neural plasticity for sound encoding. To study this phenomenon, we examined whether adult musicians display enhanced rapid neural plasticity compared to non-musicians. More specifically...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS According to existing literature, musicians are at risk of experiencing a range of painful musculoskeletal conditions. Recently, a novel digital technology was developed to investigate pain location and pain extent. The aim of this study was to describe pain location and pain extent in musicians using a digital method for pain drawing (PD) analysis. Additionally, the associa...

The perception of music and speech both involve processing complex acoustic stimuli. It remains unclear, however, whether the same or distinct mechanisms are implicated in music and speech perception. Previous research suggested that musical training may facilitate linguistic pitch perception. (Alexander, Wong, and Bradlow, 2005) Deutsch et al (2006) reported higher proportion of absolute pitch...

For musicians, the impact of noise exposure is not yet fully characterized. Some inconsistencies can be found in the methodology used to evaluate noise exposure. This study aims to analyze the noise exposure of musicians in a symphonic orchestra to understand their risk for hearing loss, applying the methodology proposed by ISO 9612:2009. Noise levels were monitored among musicians during the r...