Just 11 weeks of piano lessons can improve audio-visual processing

Musical training has been linked to all kinds of benefits, including being better at recognising emotions and improved cognitive functioning even decades later. However, most of these studies have involved comparing musicians with non-musicians — and it can be hard to know whether musical training itself caused improvements, or whether perhaps the two groups were different to start with.

Now Yuqing Che at the University of Bath and colleagues report the results of a randomised controlled trial. Their paper in Scientific Reports reveals that just 11 weeks of weekly hour-long piano lessons boosts the ability to detect whether an image and sound are in sync. This is, they claim, the first evidence that musical training causes an improvement in audio-visual processing outside the realm of music-related perception.

The team ran a lab-based study on 31 healthy adults, none of whom reported formal musical training beyond school music lessons. One group received the weekly individual piano lessons while a second group spent an hour a week listening to the simple pieces of music that the others were learning. A control group read or studied quietly during these periods.

Every two weeks, the participants were tested on their sensitivity to ‘audio-visual synchrony’. They were presented with a series of circle images accompanied by beeps, and also video clips in which a man was making an ‘o’ sound. The team slightly varied the timings of the images and the sounds, so that some were presented in synchrony while others were out to some degree.

The results showed that after 11 weeks, the participants who’d had the piano lessons had got better at judging whether an image and a sound were synchronous, or not. The other two groups did not show this improvement, which was still evident two weeks after the final piano lesson.

Every two weeks, the team had also tested the participants’ ability to recognise various emotions from brief videos of faces. But at the end of the study period, those who’d had piano lessons were no better than the others at this. This supports results from earlier studies of musicians and non-musicians that have suggested that although musical training can improve emotion perception too, these benefits are restricted to recognising emotions in people’s voices but not facial expressions.

There are some limitations to the study, not least the small number of participants. Also, the researchers report some additional findings that should be considered very preliminary. For instance, they find that people who’d initially scored higher on autistic traits might have gained a greater synchrony-sensitivity benefit from the piano lessons — at least when it came to the flashes and beeps. This could be important, as autistic people tend to be poorer at audio-visual processing, which can affect speech comprehension, among other things. But as the team notes, a similar study involving autistic people would be needed to explore whether music lessons could help them in this way.

It’s also worth pointing out, though, that the musical training in this study was very limited. Perhaps more frequent lessons and/or practice, for longer, would lead to additional, or bigger benefits.

For now: “Our results show, for the first time, how 11 weeks of musical training can significantly enhance audio-visual perception,” the team writes. Importantly, “our results show that it was the music training that delivered this advantage, rather than other factors or predispositions that cannot be excluded in cross-sectional studies.”