Our auditory processing system is possibly our largest information-gathering sense. It keeps us safe and it processes mountains of information without our knowledge. It also never turns off. But, sometimes it gets tired and a bit overwhelmed.

I am sure there is a joke in there, but as you think about what it is, you should have a look at this new study. It looked into the differences between auditory processing skills, like auditory memory, and speech in noise.

Music is with us every day. Not just what we hear on the radio or our phone, but in the sound landscapes we are surrounded by that include speech.

For quite some time, researchers have been trying to understand the brain mechanisms that result in the condition known as dyslexia. It is a complex puzzle, the kind that researchers love!

Tinnitus is a fascinating and challenging condition to live with. The reason why it is so fascinating is that it seems to have no point of origin or malfunctioning area, it is a disease that stretches across the brain.

Do you use background music when you are completing a creative task? If you do, do you find that your creative output is better, more innovative or unexpected, or does the background music hinders these outputs?

If you were to look at a standard weekly timetable for a kindergarten class, you would hopefully see at least one music learning class. This study looked at the regular 40-minute weekly sessions of music learning for kindergarten.

This study looked at children using cochlear implants between the age of 6-9 years due to prelingual sensorineural hearing loss.

Audio-visual integration is the integration of things we hear with the things we see. Why would this be important? Well, have you ever watched a video where the sound and picture are out of sync?

Pitch pattern recognition is vital for both music comprehension and understanding the prosody of speech, which signals emotion and intent. But what happens when you can’t hear pitch patterns – do you enjoy music less and hear less emotion in speech?

Researchers have looked very closely at this phenomenon to understand if it is certain characteristics of music that elicit an emotional response, if it is a totally individual experience, or if it is a bit of both.

Have you ever noticed when you are driving with music playing, or your children are chatting in the back as you drive to a new place, you quickly turn the music down or ask the kids to be quiet?