'Researchers at Northwestern University have found that the more years of musical experience musicians possess, and the earlier the age at which they began studying music, the better their nervous systems are at interpreting the emotional content of sound.
The study was led by doctoral student Dana Strait, who conducts her research in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at the university (and who is herself a pianist and oboe player).
Strait points out that scientists already know that emotion in speech is carried less by the specific meanings of the words being used than by the sound of those words.
. . . Strait and her colleagues enlisted 30 right-handed men and women, with and without music training, between the ages of 19 and 35. The ones with music training were grouped using two criteria–their total years of music experience and whether their training began before or after the age of seven.
Participants watched a subtitled nature film to keep them entertained (“entertained” is apparently a loose term) while listening through headphones to a “scientifically validated emotion sound”–specifically, 250 milliseconds–a quarter of a second–of a distressed baby’s cry.
Sensitivity to the sound, particularly the more complicated part of the sound that contributes most to its emotional content, was measured through scalp electrodes, which allowed the researchers to track brainstem processing of the sound’s pitch, timing and timbre. . . '
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