Our ears are open all of the time. Even when sleeping, newborn infants subconsciously respond to the sounds around them. This means that from birth (Namath et al., 2015), humans are constantly exposed to the sounds of the environment. There is so much research evidence to support this. (Kraus & Chandrasekaran, 2010) and researchers have underlined the importance of this initial, subconscious stage of mapping out the sounds of our environment using our brain’s auditory processes.

Before sound reaches our attention, the auditory brainstem responds to incoming information from our ears, integrating the spatial, rhythmic and acoustic features of the sounds that surround us. These features include frequency (high and low pitches), the timbre of the sound (for example, differentiating between human voices) and rhythmic features (such as the regularity or predictability of sounds).

The auditory brainstem is extremely sensitive to very subtle differences in sound waves, such as individual phonemes in language (phonological awareness). It plays a critical role in early identification of sounds and their patterns. Over time, the auditory brainstem produces a response to sound that is unique to each individual. But this is not only about sound according to Nina Kraus,

Thus, the auditory brainstem response reflects the current state of the nervous system – the state at that time formed by an individual’s life experience with sound (Kraus & Chandrasekaran 2010, pp. 601).

In particular, researchers have found that the auditory brainstem seems to respond with greatest clarity to the sounds with which the individual is most familiar. Having listened to brainstem responses of musicians, they found that pianists’ brainstem responses to the sounds produced by a piano were very sharply defined when they were compared to the brainstem responses of musicians who were not pianists. Brainstem responses also appeared to receive feedback information from cortical areas of the brain (Strait et al., 2010) - the parts of the brain that we use for thinking, planning, communicating, whilst undertaking day-to-day tasks.

This means that the way we make use of sounds helps our brains to become more efficient. Certain sounds means certain things in a particular context. For instance, the repeated bleep pattern that signals that it is safe to cross the road is learned subconsciously as a signal of safety. Every time we cross a road because we hear the signal, we add another layer of experiential learning, which feeds back down to the auditory brainstem.

There are many examples of this form of learning. When children are getting to know their teacher, they attune to the different qualities in their teacher’s voice. There are two benefits of doing this. The first is that the children can monitor their teacher’s emotional set point - the extent to which they can tolerate children’s playful behavior. The secondly benefit is that the children are better able to process the content of the curriculum, if they have developed auditory sensitivity for their teacher’s way of speaking.

In terms of research, (Skoe et al., 2014) neuroscientists have proposed that the availability of cortical feedback (from the cognitive processing of sound) allows the auditory brainstem response to become increasingly specific over time. For instance, when they looked at musical expertise that had accumulated over a lifetime among professional musicians, they found extremely fine-grained auditory brainstem responses. Here’s the thing. These fine-grained auditory responses in the brainstem did not only relate to musical sounds, but also to the sounds of language.

If you are supporting children with early reading, this is for you!! The researchers discovered that working with music sharpened the auditory processing of phonemes and prosody - also known as intonation or the pitch contours of language (Musacchia et al., 2007).

Once the brainstem has adapted to cortical feedback, it becomes increasingly specialised in the way it processes sound. Researchers have also found that the auditory brainstem appears to retain its enhanced structures. They discovered this by studying speakers of Mandarin and amateur musicians (Bidelman et al., 2011).

Overall, these studies show three key things.

• An overlap exists between early stage auditory processing of spoken language and musical experiences.

• Cognitive feedback informs development of these structures.

• Expertise in music appears to enhance the auditory brainstem response to language,

Each of these points coincide with the results we see from group teaching in the Rhythm for Reading programme. Together these research studies go some to explaining why it is that a rhythm-based approach, which uses the same skills that are developed by professional musicians, can also work as an early reading intervention.

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REFERENCES

Bidelman, G.M., Gandour, J.T., Krishnan, A., (2011). Cross-domain effects of music and language experience on the representation of pitch in the human auditory brainstem. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 23, 425–434.

Kraus, N and Chandrasekaran, B. (2010) Music training for the development of auditory skills, Nature Neuroscience, 11, pp. 599-605

Musacchia, G., Sams, M., Skoe, E. & Kraus, N. (2007) Musicians have enhanced subcortical auditory and audiovisual processing of speech and music. Proc. Nate Acad. Sci. USA 104.

Nameth, R., Haden, G., Miklos, T. & Winkler, I (2015) Processing of horizontal sound localization cues in newborn infants, Ear and Hearing, 36 (5), pp. 550-556

Skoe, E., Krizman, J., Spitzer, E., & Kraus, N. (2014) Prior experiences biases subcortical sensitivity to sound patterns, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 27 (1), pp.124-140

Strait, D.L. Chan, K., Ashley, R., & Kraus, N (2010) Specialisation among the specialised: Auditory brainstem function is tuned to timbre, Cortex, 48, pp. 360-362