Adapting Soundscapes: Exploring the neuroplasticity of auditory perception

Our ability to hear provides us with an incredibly rich source of information about the world and, through language and music, plays a hugely important role in human communication. At the heart of this lies the remarkable capacity of auditory neurons to adjust their responses. Rapid adaptation to the statistics of the auditory world allows behaviourally relevant sound features to be perceived across a range of soundscapes, while longer-term plasticity provides the basis for learning language and musical training and offers the potential for recovery of function following hearing loss.

Music has fascinated humanity for millennia, due to its uniqueness among the arts. Recently, its relevance has expanded into the domain of science, electing it as a key proxy to understand the mechanisms of the brain underlying complex cognitive processes. In this talk, I will share findings from my research using mathematically controlled musical sequences in memory tasks, revealing how we learn and recognise patterns in music and auditory sequences. Moreover, I will discuss how aging affects these processes, offering clues to better understand pathological conditions like dementia.