The question “Does singing and listening to music during pregnancy help my baby’s brain?” and the answer are both complex and evolving. We do know that our auditory processing network is active before birth, probably in the final trimester, and that just after birth, babies use their music processing network to understand their mother’s speech […]

Bilingualism and music learning have often been connected when it comes to auditory processing development. Do you know why? The reason for this connection is that music and language share an overlapping neural network, so the more we use that overlapping network, the faster, better and more effectively our language and music development will be. […]

Can you think of tasks you do regularly that demand a low level of sustained attention? It could be something that is repetitive and doesn’t really require deep thought. At the BBB office, we immediately said house cleaning! It is not hard to do, but it is repetitive, requires lots of movement patterns, and has […]

Do you know someone who struggles to hear the emotions in speech? Imagine a situation where two friends meet a third friend for lunch. The two friends come away from the lunch date, and one says, “well, she seems like she is doing very well” while the other says, “she sounded so defeated by her […]

Have you ever noticed when you are driving with music playing, or your children are chatting in the back as you drive to a new place, you quickly turn the music down or ask the kids to be quiet? Why do we need quiet to do new things and, conversely, why do we find having […]

Age-related hearing loss, it doesn’t sound very good. However, it is something that almost every person as they age will begin to experience. With hearing loss comes not only the lowering of our ability to hear the nuances in sound and some specific sounds altogether, but it can also lead to a withdrawal from conversations […]

When we listen to music, we can experience many levels of engagement – from very intense emotions to no identifiable emotions at all. Researchers have looked very closely at this phenomenon to understand if it is certain characteristics of music that elicit an emotional response, if it is a totally individual experience, or if it […]

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 […]

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 […]

Do you use background music when you are completing a creative task? If you do, do you find that your creative output is better, more innovative or unexpected, or does the background music hinders these outputs? In this study, the researchers used four conditions, meaning four different options for background sounds. These were background music […]