Ever wondered what that tingling sensation in your brain or on your scalp is called when you listen to music? We hadn’t wondered, but we feel better now that we know. It is called the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR). We probably won’t remember that long name or the acronym but “head orgasm” is a […]

Pitch pattern recognition is vital for both music comprehension and understanding the prosody of speech, which signals emotion and intent. But what happens when you can’t hear pitch patterns – do you enjoy music less and hear less emotion in speech? It is very hard to assess the enjoyment of music or speech, but it […]

Here is a question we get from parents all the time – should I let my teenager listen to music while they study? First of all, what is the greatest concern for parents – that their child will be distracted, will not complete their study tasks or that they are just goofing off during the […]

One of BBB’s favourite researchers, Dr Patricia Izbicki, has done all the hard work for us and summarised the five great reasons why music learning is the childhood experience that just keeps on giving well into our later life. Here is her five reasons why your brain will thank you for learning music; 1. Music […]

“I succeeded as an entrepreneur not despite the fact that I had a music degree, but precisely because of it.” This statement came from Panos Panay, the founding managing director of the Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship at Berklee College of Music. Prior to his return, in a way, to the world of music, he had […]

To keep a beat, our brains have to get the auditory and motor cortices to first synchronise and then maintain that synchronisation as small things change in the music. To maintain a rhythm, our brains need to do all of that plus constantly monitor how the rhythm is fitting into the beat. It looks easy, […]

Audio-visual integration is the integration of things we hear with the things we see. Why would this be important? Well, have you ever watched a video where the sound and picture are out of sync? Imagine that happening inside your own brain. Concentrating would be hard, let alone learning anything if most of the world […]

Music learning is studied in two basic ways with children – as a tool to understand and enhance typical brain development and a tool to improve delayed brain development that has been impacted by environmental or medical factors. These latter factors could be living in challenging circumstances due to loss of hearing from an accident […]

If you were to look at a standard weekly timetable for a kindergarten class, you would hopefully see at least one music learning class. This might be a 40, 50 or 60-minute class which, for 20 x 5-year-olds, would require a great deal of detailed planning by the teacher to maintain quality learning and engagement […]

Would a pianist make a better surgeon? Isn’t this a fascinating question? In a recent article in the journal Music and Medicine, a team of researchers studied a group of pianists to see if the benefits of learning piano translated into benefits when learning complex and refined motor skills in another domain, specifically surgical skills. […]

Researchers have wondered if “listening to comforting music, as a response to a social loss experience, provides a sense of empathic company as indicated by reduced loneliness and heightened empathy.” Is a pandemic, such as the one we are living through at the moment, a form of social loss? If we look at social media, […]

Is it nature or nurture? Is it biological, magic or a quirk? One of the musical prodigies involved in the BRAMS study in Canada into the cognitive predispositions for musical genius explained the mixture that she believes contributed to her extraordinary musical ability. “Our success is like the three legs of a grand piano,” says […]