Changing the way we perceive the world through music

Some of my favourite musical experiences have been listening to a familiar piece in a brand new setting. Hearing a live version of a song, or a new recording of an old piece, or even listening to an oldie on a new stereo can bring music to life again. It’s like hearing something for the first time: I notice something new, like a bass line I never paid attention to before, or a harmony I didn’t realize was so interesting.  

Pleasurable listening experiences like these point to some important features of perception. When we find something interesting in the music we’re listening to, we’re using our faculty of perception. 

Perception goes deeper than just using your senses. It’s what allows us to make sense of what we’re seeing or listening to – in effect, combining that sensory information with prior knowledge, predispositions, and experience to find patterns, features, and coherence. 

In many cases, we’re not even explicitly aware that our perception is at work. Consider our experience with music. Even without training, most people “get” music: They understand what they’re hearing, clap on the beat, and notice if there’s a wrong note. Indeed, music contains a lot of interesting material to perceive, such as rhythmic structures, musical keys, and dynamic patterns – most of which are unconsciously processed by the listener.  

It’s when find ourselves in a different setting or environment, or hear a new recording of a beloved song, that we’re more inclined to pay attention to what we actually perceive. It’s what makes those moments special. 

Developing a perceptive ear 

You may be asking, if we all instinctively perceive music, why bother studying it? Well, here’s the thing: It might sound like a bad bumper sticker, but musicians do it better. Yes, most people can perceive a note that’s off-key, but musicians do it more accurately: they can follow a beat more precisely and better discern patterns unfolding over time. In fact, training and practicing music leads to a more perceptive ear.  

In addition, studies show that musicians’ brains are different than those of non-musicians. Larger portions of their brains are devoted to auditory processing, which shows increased activity when perceiving changes in a musical pattern (even unconsciously). Recent findings also show that musicians’ neural signals in the brainstem follow the pitch of a sound more precisely than non-musicians – which means that musicians work with more faithful representations of the sounds they hear.  

Benefits extend to language 

Even more interesting is that musicians’ auditory advantages aren’t just limited to music – they transfer to language as well, including having a richer vocabulary and more advanced grammar skills.  

Much of our work at the RCM Research Centre revolves around examining perceptual skills in musicians and understanding how improvements in these skills can transfer to other domains like language. For instance, we study connections between singing or keeping a beat and phonetic recognition; how musicians can discern speech in noisy contexts; and even how they pick up different accents. These studies help us to delve deeper into the fundamental processes that are common to both music and language, and help us learn more about the role music plays in the developing brain. 

Starting early, starting smart 

Perception is an important focus in our Smart Start^TM curriculum for early childhood music education. We have designed activities to target core perceptual skills such as pattern recognition and feature searching. For example, at two years old, children learn to internalize the beat of a song and learn to recognize the basic form of a song as it changes across repetitions. At age 5, children may be asked to recognize a glissando (though not by name!) in a musical accompaniment to a song about apples falling from a tree.