“Kraus and colleagues compared the performance of 16 musicians and 15 non-musicians on two tests of speech-in-noise perception. In the both experiments, participants had to listen to simple sentences under noisy conditions and repeat back what they heard. By adjusting the level of background noise and counting the number of correctly repeated words or sentences, the researchers calculated a threshold signal-to-noise ratio for each person.

On both speech tests, musicians dramatically outperformed their non-musician counterparts and also demonstrated better working memory. “The extent of musical experience also mattered,” Kraus said. “The earlier you began and the more years you had been practicing, the better your speech-in-noise perception.” Found on Wired Science.