Hearing in the News

By Gail Linn, MA, CCC-A

I have a patient who has a profound hearing loss and is a musician. He brought in his musical instrument and wanted me to program his aids so that he could practice, play and listen to music. Programming hearing aids for speech versus music is quite different. I was shocked at his ability to hear small differences in programming while he was playing his instrument. I liken it to someone with very sophisticated taste for foods, wines and spices.
After thinking about his ability, I theorized that he has listened so intently his whole life that he has developed his hearing discrimination in ways that most people do not. Recently I was reading an article in the professional journal that reported on some research that looked at musicians and their abilities. Apparently, musicians are trained to listen to melodies and harmonies that are imbedded in music. This training appears to be useful for understanding speech in noise.
The researchers took 31 individuals and divided them into two groups, those with musical training and those without. Each group was given sentences with increasing levels of background noise. The musicians had better sentence understanding as well as better fine-grained frequency discrimination and working memory.
We know there is a large variation among individuals of all ages with regards to discrimination, auditory memory and the processing of speech in noise. This new research points to the potential use of musical training as a part of aural rehabilitation and auditory training.
What does this mean for you and me? Listen to music, try to follow the melodies; take up an instrument, get out our old sheet music. Encourage our children and grandchildren to play an instrument. If you are interested in the full article of this research it can be accessed at http //journals.lww.com/ear-hearing/pages/default.aspx.