News

BME Professors Anne Luebke and Ross Maddox along with Co-PI Elizabeth Marvin (Eastman School of Music) have received an award from the National Science Foundation for their project, "NeuroDataRR. Collaborative Research: Testing the relationship between musical training and enhanced neural coding and perception in noise." This is a collaborative effort involving several universities: University of Minnesota (Dr. Andrew Oxenham, Lead PI), Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, University of Western Ontario, and the University of Rochester.

This project will determine whether formal musical training is associated with enhanced neural processing and perception of sounds, including speech in noisy backgrounds. Music forms an important part of the lives of millions of people around the world, and it is one of the few universals shared by all known human cultures. Yet its utility and potential evolutionary advantages remain a mystery. This project will test the hypothesis that early musical exposure has benefits that extend beyond music to critical aspects of human communication, such as speech perception in noise. In addition, this project will test whether early musical training is associated with less severe effects of ageing on the ability to understand speech in noisy backgrounds. Degraded ability to understand speech in noise is a common complaint among older listeners, and one that can have a profound impact on quality of life, as has been shown by the associations between hearing loss, social isolation, and more rapid cognitive and health declines. If formal musical training is shown to be associated with improved perception and speech communication in later life, the outcomes could have a potentially major impact on many aspects of public and educational policy.

Claire is a junior in the Audio and Music Engineering program. She'll be helping to collect data on several experiments.

Welcome!

Our paper on recording the auditory brainstem response to continuous natural speech is out in eNeuro.

Work from Jenny Bizley's lab in London on which we collaborated has just been published in Neuron. The paper nicely matches our behavioral data (Maddox et al., 2015) and fits the model we had previously proposed (Bizley et al., 2016).

Maddy will be presenting her first poster at ARO. If you'll be there, come check it out Saturday afternoon.

Cappelloni MS, Maddox RK (2018) Behavioral Enhancement from Ambiguous Visual Cues in an Auditory Spatial Discrimination Task.

Ross will be talking to the public about audio-visual integration in San Diego! His talk is entitled: "When ears aren't enough: how your eyes help you listen." Feb 9 at 5 PM.