No need to shout (Image: Stephen Mallon/Riser/Getty)

If you struggle to follow the conversation at noisy parties, music lessons might help.

Nina Kraus and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have previously shown that playing an instrument seems to enhance our ability to pick up emotional cues in conversation.

Now her team has found differences in brain activity that they say make musicians better at picking out speech from background noise.


After establishing that musicians are better at repeating a sentence heard in the presence of background noise, the researchers asked 16 lifelong musicians and 15 non-musicians to listen to speech in a quiet or noisy environment while they were wearing scalp electrodes to monitor their brain activity.

Slow reactions

Background noise delayed the brain’s response, but this delay was much shorter in the musicians. What’s more, in the noisy environment, the musicians’ brainwaves were more similar to the sound waves of the speech than in non-musicians.

The difference could be partly genetic, but Kraus says training is likely to help. “Musicians spend a lot of time extracting particular sounds from a soundscape.”

If that is the case, musical training could provide real benefits to children with autism or language difficulties, who tend to find understanding speech in a noisy environment particularly difficult, says Kraus – and for other children too.

“Music education is not just about teaching your child how to play the flute, it’s about teaching your child to function better in our noisy auditory environment,” she says.

Journal reference: The Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.3256-09.2009