Playing music to improve hearing in noise and tune the brain

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, musicians out-perform non-musicians in ways that are farther removed from those that might be expected from exposure to the acoustics and mechanics of playing an instrument. For example various studies have found that musicians excel in vocabulary, reading, non-verbal reasoning, perception of speech in background noise, auditory memory and
attention.