Does listening to music increase your ability to discriminate musical sounds?

Abstract

Music listening plays an important role in the daily lives of many. It remains unclear what explains variation in how much time people spend listening to music and whether music listening improves musical auditory discrimination skills. In 10,780 Swedish twin individuals, data were available on hours of music listening, musical engagement and musical auditory discrimination. Genetic and shared environmental factors together explain half of the variation in music listening in both sexes. Hours of music listening was positively associated with musical auditory discrimination in both sexes and this effect was independent of whether individuals played a musical instrument. However, the effect di..