Both music and language are unique and essential aspects of human culture that require the recognition, interpretation, and handling of complex sounds that are hierarchically arranged; in theorder of syllables, words, and sentences in speech and notes, beats,and phrases in music. To process music and language, the brainmust decode these signals by extracting relevant informationfrom an ever rapidly changing sound environment. This processis cognitively demanding, and the neural circuits responsible forboth music and language processing are known to be similar [1].It has been speculated that the cognitive abilities of music andlanguage processing transfer from one to the other through thereorganization of common neural circuits [2]. Many studies havevalidated this hypothesis by showing that musical training improvesspeech processing at the levels of perception of speech prosody,consonant contrasts, speech segmentation, and syntactic processing [3]. Individuals with vocational musical experience alsotend to have better verbal memory [4]. These findings extend tothe subcortical level, showing an enhancement of the neural representations of the pitch, timbre, and timing of speech soundsafter musical practice that correlates with a better ability to perceive speech in noise. Overall, the advantages induced by musical training enhance the neural coding of sounds, in both cortical and subcortical structures, extending to speech sounds [1].These benefits of musical training among normal-hearing adultshave naturally led to the utilization of musical training for hearing aid and cochlear implant users. The existing literature suggeststhat musical training can improve perceptions, localization, differentiation, and recognition of sound. Significant improvementsin appreciation of timbre and identification of melodic contourshave been observed in cochlear implant users. Better tone recognition and speech perception have also been recognized inspeakers of tonal languages [5,6].
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