In learning to play an instrument, musicians develop skills in differentiating timing of rhythms, pitches, and layered musical parts. Because of changes in the brain that come from being trained in an instrument, research has shown that musicians have an advantage in understanding speech in background noise (1). However, does the age at which an individual learns to play an instrument affect these benefits? Similar to the critical period of language development, scientists have predicted that there is a sensitive period for music training that lasts until children are seven years old (2). To study the effect that the age of onset of music training has on a person’s hearing in noise ability, the study will look to see whether subjects who started private music lessons before the age of seven perform better on a specific hearing-in-noise task than those that learned an instrument after. Participants were divided into three groups based on their years of musical lessons and their age of onset of training. Data was collected through testing participants with a speech-in-noise test called the QuickSIN to determine if there was a difference in results between those that started lessons within the sensitive period and those that started after. Results of testing revealed that there was no significant difference in the testing results between the group that started lessons before they were seven years old and the group that started after. Additionally, testing with the QuickSIN also revealed no significant difference in results between the groups of musicians and non-musicians.

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(1) Parbery-Clark, A., Skoe, E., & Kraus, N. (2009). Musical Experience Limits the Degradative Effects of Background Noise on the Neural Processing of Sound. Journal of Neuroscience, (45), 14100.

(2) Steele, C. J. ( 1,2 ), Bailey, J. A. ( 1 ), Penhune, V. B. ( 1 ), & Zatorre, R. J. ( 3 ). (n.d.). Early musical training and white-matter plasticity in the corpus callosum: Evidence for a sensitive period. Journal of Neuroscience, 33(3), 1282–1290.

Natalie Seidl would like to thank their faculty sponsor Maureen Fischer for their support of this project.