Are musicians better able to understand speech in noise than non-musicians? Recent findings have produced contradictory results. Here we addressed this question by asking musicians and non-musicians to understand target sentences masked by other sentences presented from different spatial locations, the classical 'cocktail party problem' in speech science. We found that musicians obtained a subs...

The corpus callosum (CC) is a brain structure composed of axon fibres linking the right and left hemispheres. Musical training is associated with larger midsagittal cross-sectional area of the CC, suggesting that interhemispheric communication may be faster in musicians. Here we compared interhemispheric transmission times (ITTs) for musicians and non-musicians. ITT was measured by comparing si...

When compared with individuals without explicit training in music, adult musicians have facilitated neural functions in several modalities. They also display structural changes in various brain areas, these changes corresponding to the intensity and duration of their musical training. Previous studies have focused on investigating musicians with training in Western classical music. However, mus...

Long-term music training can positively impact speech processing. A recent framework developed to explain such cross-domain plasticity posits that music training-related advantages in speech processing are due to shared cognitive and perceptual processes between music and speech. Although perceptual and cognitive processing advantages due to music training have been independently demonstrated, ...

Absolute pitch (AP) is possessed by only a small percentage of musicians (typically < 20%). From a sample of 46 early blind subjects, we identified 21 who had musical training, 12 of whom (57.1%) reported having AP, reflecting markedly increased prevalence compared to sighted musicians, despite the fact that mean age of commencement of musical training was significantly later among blind than s...

BACKGROUND Task specific tremors in musicians have been mainly described as primary bowing tremor in string instrumentalists in relatively small sample sizes. Our aim was to describe epidemiology, risk factors, phenomenology and treatment options of this disorder in 23 musicians of different instruments. METHODS We included 23 professional musicians (4 female, 19 male; mean age 51.5 ± 11.4 ye...

Peripheral nervous system can influence learning and memory functions by increasing the activity level (‘arousal’) of the system with increasing task difficulty. Several studies show that musicians discriminate auditory stimuli more effectively both neurally and behaviourally. Yet, the effects of individual peripheral nervous responses or personality during auditory learning have not studied in...

Meg responses from musicians who had absolute pitch and from non-musicians were measured while they received different auditory stimuli. The parameters of single equivalent current dipoles (ECDs) were calculated for the N1m responses occurring in the auditory cortex. The location of the ECD for the noise burst was significantly posterior to the ECDs for the tones in the two hemispheres of the m...