At the conference, Pascale took part in a symposium entitled “Efficacy and neural mechanisms of singing in ageing and neurological rehabilitation” with three colleagues: Aleksi Sihvonen (University of Helsinki, Finland), Jeanette Tamplin (The University of Melbourne, Australia), and Christian Gold (NORCE Norwegian Research Centre, Norway): a fine international team! The work presented at the symposium revealed how singing can modulate brain structures and enhance cognitive abilities in older adults, while shedding light on the underlying neurobiological mechanisms.

The work presented by Pascale, involving hundreds of healthy older adults with and without amateur singing experience, revealed benefits of singing on speech perception in noise, better articulation in difficult contexts, and superior auditory conflict resolution abilities in amateur singers. Analysis of the MRI data revealed significant structural differences in the cortex and arcuate bundle, as well as higher resting connectivity in the default mode network in singers compared to non-singers. These findings suggest that amateur singing could help maintain and even improve certain brain functions in the elderly, by facilitating auditory comprehension, articulation and management of sound information. The presentation was received very positively, underlining the quality and rigour of our work!

The datasets from two projects on this topic are currently being analyzed in the lab, and several articles are being written. This work involves several team members, including Pascale, Alexandre, Xiyue, Lydia, and soon Amélie and Sarah-Ève. This fall will also see the start of a study on learning to sing (a project we have named MELODIC (Measuring Elderly Language Organisation Development through Integrated Choir singing). Stay tuned !