What's an easy way to be heard in a noisy place?
Some people may have had trouble hearing what their friends or family are saying when they are talking at a restaurant or other place because the other customers sitting at a nearby table are noisy. A paper published in the academic journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B in April 2025 showed a 'simple way to hear voices in noisy places.'
Moving rhythmically can facilitate naturalistic speech perception in a noisy environment | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
This Simple Trick Could Help You Hear Better in a Noisy Room : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-simple-trick-could-help-you-hear-better-in-a-noisy-room
Finger tapping rhythm boosts speech comprehension in noisy environments
https://newatlas.com/learning-memory/tapping-finger-hearing-comprehension/
A research team from the University of Aix-Marseille in France conducted several experiments to clarify the role that 'motor' plays in human speech understanding. According to the research team, the motor system not only executes body movements but also contributes to the integration and reuse of temporal information.
The subjects, all native French speakers, listened to a recording of someone reading aloud a set sentence, but there was background noise playing, making it difficult to understand the sentence.
The research team gave participants several different sets of instructions to see which would improve their ability to hear speech in noisy environments.
In the first experiment, 35 subjects listened to long sentences mixed with noise and wrote down the words they recognized while tapping their fingers to different beats (slow, medium, fast, or at a self-paced pace). As a control, some subjects were asked to listen to the audio without tapping.
The results of the experiment showed that subjects who listened to audio by tapping at their own pace or tapping to a specified beat had significantly improved ability to identify words in the sentences. Listening ability improved especially when subjects tapped at a medium beat, specifically about two times per second. This pace of about two times per second was roughly equivalent to the speed at which the words in the sentences were spoken to the subjects.
Subsequent experiments compared listening ability when participants tapped freely or to a set beat with listening to a set beat in silence, and found that participants who only listened to the beat without tapping did not improve their listening ability significantly.
These results suggest that physical activity can help improve listening comprehension. 'These findings provide evidence for a functional role of the motor system in processing the temporal dynamics of natural speech,' the researchers conclude.
Finally, in a third experiment with another 28 participants, we analyzed whether speaking a single word before listening to a noisy sentence improves sensory processing. The results showed that listening ability improved even if the spoken word was not related to the sentence, again suggesting that body movements are important for speech comprehension.
Science Alert, a science media outlet, commented, 'The results suggest that rhythmically tapping your fingers may help you 'entrain' yourself to a voice even in a noisy environment.' 'If you're on a date at a restaurant and the table next to you is too noisy to hear, you might want to give this a try.'
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