This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of the methodological approach to collecting and analyzing auditory brain stem responses to complex sounds (cABRs) and has considerable utility in the study of populations where auditory function is of interest.
The results of music training in relation to brain plasticity suggest that, akin to physical exercise and its impact on body fitness, music is a resource that tones the brain for auditory fitness.
This work examined brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch and found that musicians show more robust and faithful encoding compared with nonmusicians, suggesting a possible reciprocity of corticofugal speech and music tuning, providing neurophysiological explanations for musicians' higher language-learning ability.
Right-hemisphere auditory cortex was 100% more accurate in following contours of the speech envelope and had a 33% larger response magnitude while following the envelope compared with the left hemisphere, providing evidence that the right hemisphere plays a specific and important role in speech processing and support the hypothesis that acoustic processing of speech involves the decomposition of the signal into constituent temporal features by rate-specialized neurons in right- and left-hemicycle auditory cortex.
Watching videos of speech and music enhanced temporal and frequency encoding in the auditory brainstem, particularly in musicians, demonstrating practice-related changes in the early sensory encoding of auditory and audiovisual information.
The putative neural sources of the scalp-recorded brain stem response are examined and recent evidence that demonstrates that the brainstem response to speech is dynamic in nature and malleable by experience is reviewed.
Musicians outperformed the nonmusicians on both QuickSIN and HINT, in addition to having more fine-grained frequency discrimination and better working memory, which suggest that this enhancement is derived in part from musicians' enhanced working memory and frequency discrimination.
It is suggested that musical experience limits the negative effects of competing background noise, thereby providing the first biological evidence for musicians' perceptual advantage for speech-in-noise.