Music & The Brain
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Evidence for a sensitive period in the musical brain
Hello dear reader, I very much hope that your January is going well. We have had some snow here in London which was nice but everyone is getting a little tired of the freezing conditions by now. This week I am trying to do some testing but it is going very slowly as people are frequently not turning up for sessions (grrrr). One advantage of this is that I have some extra reading time and thanks to this I came across a new paper that is all about the issue of whether there is a ‘sensitive period’ for musical training. Does earlier musical training have greater effects on the brain…
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Musical times, they are a-changin’…
Hello, dear reader. This week I thought I would write about the changing world of defining and measuring musicality. Once upon a time it was a simple case of asking someone how many years they had been training as a musician. Maybe you might stretch to how often they had practised in the past or now. But essentially, that was it; one or two numbers which defined an individual’s musicality. And we learned a lot using this method. If it did not work, if it did not throw up fascinating group differences, then it would have disappeared a long time ago. But the fact is that it fostered decades of…