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 […]

Tinnitus is a fascinating and challenging condition to live with. Many scientists in the neuromusical field suffer from tinnitus, so they have a vested interest in studying it. The reason why it is so fascinating is that it seems to have no point of origin or malfunctioning area, it is a disease that stretches across […]

For quite some time, researchers have been trying to understand the brain mechanisms that result in the condition known as dyslexia. For scientists, it is a fascinating condition because it can present in a variety of ways, and the issues seem to arise from a number of different neural processes. It is a complex puzzle, […]

Premature babies struggle from the start, and although their auditory processing networks are well developed by the third trimester, the sensory overload that comes from being in a neonatal intensive care unit can have profound effects on their long term development. This research is therefore very important, not just for preterm babies but for their […]

This article is about the stuff of music – sound. Music learning assists in refining sound processing and is particularly important in the processing and engaging with language for children between 8-16 years of age. “Children with hearing problems tend to do less well than their peers in terms of language development and academic performance. […]

Some people have favourite fiction writers. We (The BBB Team) have favourite science writers. This abstract alone by Prof. Nina Kraus and Dr. Travis White-Schwoch has some great gems in it. Let’s start with this one: “The active, repeated engagement with sound demanded by music making augments the neural processing of speech, eventually cascading to […]