Sound is an invisible and powerful force

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 listening and language.”

The processing of music when we listen to it is demanding, but when we add in the processing of making it, moving our fingers across the valves, blowing just the right air stream into the instrument or putting just the right pressure through the bow, that processing ramps up. The demand this places on the auditory processing system is significant, and because language shares the same system, making music has the capacity to enhance both language and music processing.

“This generalisation from music to everyday communications illustrates both that these auditory brain mechanisms have a profound potential for plasticity and that sound processing is biologically intertwined with listening and language skills.”

Music is with us every day. Not just what we hear on the radio or our phone, but in the sound landscapes we are surrounded by that include speech. Our brains understand the world initially as music. From this foundation, our brains then begin to understand language and all the other noise.

This is a fundamental shift in the idea of what music and language are to our brains.