Title

Musical training gives edge in auditory processing

Description

A musician and a researcher, Dr. Nina Kraus describes her work investigating the effect of musical training on auditory processing and its implications for literacy in children. Kraus_HJ2011
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Title

Facing the music: Musicianship’s effect on the brain

Description

Musical training has a pervasive positive effect. This is manifested in a number of interesting ways. First, unsurprisingly perhaps, musicians excel at pitch and rhythm perception and discrimination. Likewise, instrumental musicians tend to have superior fine motor skills. More intriguingly, mus...
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Title

20Q: Noise, aging and the brain – How experience and training can improve communication

Description

Nina Kraus, PhD, is Professor of Neurobiology & Physiology, Otolaryngology, Hugh Knowles Chair, and the Director of the Auditory Neurosciences Laboratory at the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University. Dr Kraus’s research includes the investigation of learn...
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Title

Editors’ introduction to Hearing Research special issue: Music, a window into the hearing brain

Description

There has been a surge of music-themed research in the field of auditory neuroscience in the past decade. A wealth of data have confirmed that musically trained individuals have structural, functional, and developmental differences in their brains relative to nonmusicians. Together, this work als...
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Title

Music benefits across the lifespan: Enhanced processing of speech in noise

Description

Intriguing research continues to focus on music, the brain, and music’s potential in honing auditory acuity, including speech-in-noise performance and the enhancement of listening abilities. This article reviews many of these exciting findings and looks at clinical implications for auditory train...
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Title

Community-based training shows objective evidence of efficacy

Description

Auditory training works. Behavioral and neurophysiological studies have demonstrated training-related benefits in a variety of populations, including children with hearing loss or auditory-based learning impairments, young adults learning non-native lexical contrasts, and older adults with or wit...
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Title

Music, hearing, and education: From the lab to the classroom

Description

Historically, research assessing the impact of musical training has focused on those children whose families are able to pay for private lessons. In this article however, Nina Kraus outlines the findings of one of her recent projects; assessing the impact of community music programmes on neural p...
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Title

Music keeps the hearing brain young

Description

Successful speech understanding in noisy environments hinges on factors that extend beyond the ear, including cognitive abilities and the integrity of sound processing in the brain. Musical training is a robust approach to strengthen these factors—and converging evidence shows that individuals wi...
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Title

Impact of life experiences on hearing in noise

Description

People are often motivated to visit an audiologist when they begin to notice a difficulty to hear in noisy environments. Hearing-in-noise issues can arise due to many reasons, and individuals with hearing loss have more difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments than those with normal ...
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Title

The musician’s auditory world

Description

In the Kraus lab at Northwestern University, the skills that interest us most are reading and speech-in-noise (SIN) perception. Significantly, musicians excel at these very activities. Our research has led us to measuring deep-brain electroencephalograph (EEG) in response to a variety of complex ...
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Title

Playing music to improve hearing in noise and tune the brain

Description

Musical training has a pervasive positive effect. This is manifested in a number of interesting ways. First, unsurprisingly perhaps, musicians excel at pitch and rhythm perception and discrimination. Likewise, instrumental musicians tend to have superior fine-motor skills. More intriguingly, musi...
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Title

Video – Vibration & Sound: Make Sprinkles Dance

Description

Making sprinkles “dance” using sound waves in this fun activity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9IvcwZFx9s  
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