Re: [AUDITORY] Papers on lack of effect of musical training

[Samuel Mehr <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi AUDITORY, not that anyone asked, but I agree with Ian, and wrote to that effect in this Times op-ed https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opinion/sunday/music-and-success.html

But even if future studies fail to support the existence of music’s cognitive benefits, this should not deter parents from providing their children with music lessons. Our findings in no way diminish the intrinsic value of music education, which is so obvious that it needs no validation from empirical study. We’ve made literature, history, mathematics and science core elements of education. Why should music — a human activity older than the written word — be any different? 
My colleagues and I urge parents, teachers, school administrators and policy makers to make music education a part of children’s lives for the musical skills it imparts, the cultural knowledge it conveys and, above all, the joy it brings. As Aristotle wrote, music “makes the hearts of men glad: so that on this ground alone we may assume that the young ought to be trained in it.”

While there seems to be quite a bit of evidence for shared effects in the specifically auditory domain (as Nina Kraus, Robert Zatorre, and others have shown) transfer effects of music to other domains have failed to replicate across experiments, don't tend to survive corrections for multiple comparisons, are vulnerable to p-hacking, and when reported, have uniformly small effects.

As to whether or not the question is "worth asking", to quote Ian, I think that's up to researchers and funders. But personally, I've found the continuing interest in far-transfer and related "mozart effect" ideas strange, since there isn't terribly good reason to expect to find these effects to exist, psychologically, in the first place. It's far more plausible to find near-transfer in the auditory domain, and so it's little surprise that the evidence there is much stronger. And, of course, there are a huge number of other developing areas in the psychology of music that are better grounded, theoretically, which many people on this listserv are working on.

best

Sam

--

Samuel Mehr

Department of Psychology

Harvard University

Be a citizen scientist at themusiclab.org!

On Sat, Aug 15, 2020 at 6:18 AM Ian Cross <ic108@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

To play devil's advocate here, I'm not sure that the question of whether or not musical training has effects beyond music in is worth asking, other than in the political attempt to counter the philistinism of a utilitarian capitalism that discounts any investment in activities that are not obviously of immediate economic value. One of the persistent problems with research into phenomena such as "effects of musical training" or "genetics of musicality" is a failure to recognise the culture-specificity of the concepts "musical training" and "musicality".  Even in what might be construed as the fairly homogeneous musical culture of contemporary Europe, different skills are accorded different degrees of importance in different national music-educational traditions.  "Musicality" across Europe is something of a Frankenstein concept — and once one moves beyond Europe the diversity of what might count as "musicality" only increases.  Hence one would expect to find quite different answers to the question that are highly dependent on cultural context — even if one could identify what one intends by the term "music" in the first place.

 

Best,

Ian Cross

On 15/08/2020 07:57, Colette McKAY wrote:

note that papers comparing musicians and non-musicians in cross-sectional studies cannot separate effects of music training and innate (genetic based) characteristics.

Similarly, in those studies, correlations of effects with amount of music training or engagement in training cannot separate effects of training and innate characteristics.

Longitudinal training studies with careful control of expectation bias and innate characteristics are the only valid way to see if the training itself is being transferred to other cognitive or sensory domains. Unfortunately most of those studies have low quality research designs and the chance of finding an effect of music training is positively correlated with poor design (inappropriate or no control, no randomisation, wrong statistics). e.g. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2020). Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis. Mem Cognit. doi:10.3758/s13421-020-01060-2  found null effect of music training on cognitive outcomes when the correlation of effect size with quality of research design was partialled out of the analysis.

There is also a growing literature of genetic studies and twin studies that highlight the genetic differences between people with musical aptitude or not. This link is largely ignored in "music  training" studies

best,

Colette McKay

Professor Colette McKay
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From: Colette McKAY
Sent: 14 August 2020 15:01
To: Francesco Caprini; AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [AUDITORY] Papers on lack of effect of musical training

I suggest you have a look at the following meta-analysis re cognition.

Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2020). Cognitive and academic benefits of music training with children: A multilevel meta-analysis. Mem Cognit. doi:10.3758/s13421-020-01060-2

 

And this paper

Schellenberg, E. G. (2015). Music training and speech perception: a gene-environment interaction. Ann N Y Acad Sci, 1337, 170-177. doi:10.1111/nyas.12627

 

..and many papers that make claims unsubstantiated by their stats or research design.

 

Best regards,

Colette

 

Professor Colette McKay

Leader, Translational Hearing Research

Principal Scientist

Bionics Institute

384-388 Albert St

East Melbourne Vic 3002

Office: +61 3 9667 7500

Direct line: +61 3 9667 7541

Mobile: 0408698202

Fax: +61 3 9667 7518

http://www.bionicsinstitute.org/our-staff/Pages/Prof-Colette-McKay.aspx

A world leader in medical bionics

Donate today to help us change lives

 

This email is private and confidential to the intended recipient. If you are not the intended recipient please do not copy it, circulate it or take any action in reliance on it. Kindly notify me that it has been misdirected and then delete it. Thank you.

 

 

     

 

From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Francesco Caprini
Sent: Friday, 14 August 2020 2:28 AM
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AUDITORY] Papers on lack of effect of musical training

 

Dear everyone,

 

I'm currently conducting a literature review on the transfer of musical expertise onto other domains of cognition, as part of a paper where I compare musicians with sound engineers across a number of behavioural tasks, i.e. psychophysics, auditory scene analysis, sustained selective attention, and speech in noise perception.

 

I am specifically interested in papers that failed to detect an association between musicianship and any of these dimensions, which are surprisingly (or unsurprisingly?) very hard to find via canonical search engines. 

 

Would anyone know of any recent papers that might fit into this category?

 

I’m only aware of the mixed literature on speech in noise perception (see refs below).

 

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

 

Kind regards,

 

Francesco

 

 

 

**References**

 

Ruggles, D. R., Freyman, R. L., & Oxenham, A. J. (2014). Influence of musical training on understanding voiced and whispered speech in noise. PLoS ONE, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0086980

 

Boebinger, D., Evans, S., Rosen, S., Lima, C. F., Manly, T., & Scott, S. K. (2015). Musicians and non-musicians are equally adept at perceiving masked speech. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137(1), 378–387. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4904537

 

Fuller, C. D., Galvin, J. J., Maat, B., Free, R. H., & Başkent, D. (2014). The musician effect: Does it persist under degraded pitch conditions of cochlear implant simulations? Frontiers in Neuroscience, 8(8 JUN), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2014.00179

 

Skoe, E., Camera, S., & Tufts, J. (2019). Noise exposure may diminish the musician advantage for perceiving speech in noise. Ear and Hearing, 40(4), 782–793. https://doi.org/10.1097/AUD.0000000000000665

 

Madsen, S. M. K., Whiteford, K. L., & Oxenham, A. J. (2017). Musicians do not benefit from differences in fundamental frequency when listening to speech in competing speech backgrounds. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-12937-9

 

 

**********************************************

Francesco Caprini

PhD student in Auditory Neuroscience

Birkbeck, University of London

fcapri01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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-- 
Professor Ian Cross
Chair, Faculty Board of Music
Director, Centre for Music & Science
Faculty of Music
University of Cambridge
Cambridge CB3 9DP