The saying “Music to my ears” could soon have a very different meaning for people suffering from hearing impairment.
Researchers at the University of Helsinki and the University College London examined the effects of musical experiences on hearing loss in children and the outcome of the study illustrated the impact and benefit received by exposing people to music.
Evaluating Speech-in-Noise Performance
Speech-in-noise performance was the main measure researchers looked at, enrolling 43 young children in a clinical study for 14 to 17 months. 22 of the children enrolled had normal hearing while the remaining 21 had cochlear implants. The researchers already knew that children with implants had a hard time understanding speech so they introduced control and test sets which delegated participants to singing and non-singing groups.
For children in the singing group, an impressive improvement in awareness and speech-in-noise performance was observed compared to children in the non-singing group.
The Ears Are Trained by Music
There is a great deal of research demonstrating the benefits to cognitive ability and speech processing provided by musical training and this research is only one of them. In noisy settings, speech perception can be enhanced by musical training, and these results were backed by a study carried out by the Montreal Neurological Institute
Identifying speech syllables through a variety of background noises was the objective of this study which analyzed 15 musicians and 15 non-musicians.
The ages of the participants in the research by Drs. Yi and Roberts, in contrast to the Helsinki/London study, averaged 22 years old. While participants weren’t always hearing impaired, the difference in results amongst people who were trained musically and those who weren’t was considerable.
Musicians Outperform Non-Musicians
When the noise was absent, both groups had comparable results, but when any amount of background noise was incorporated, the musicians substantially outperformed the non-musicians. It’s likely that the ability to perform well on these tests was a result of enhancements to the left interior frontal and right auditory parts found within the brains of the musicians.
But the benefits of musical training revealed by Drs. Yi and Robert’s research don’t just end there. According to the study’s conclusions, musical training strengthened the participant’s auditory-motor network, refining and uniting the auditory system and speech motor system to improve hearing.
These adult musicians in this study had all been educated when they were younger and had at least a decade of training. This once again backs the recent analysis that musical training can have a powerful impact.
The Impact of Hearing Loss on Beethoven
Hearing loss has been an issue for some of the world’s most well-known composers and musicians. Perhaps the most famous deaf composer, Ludwig van Beethoven was able to hear when he was born, but that started to deteriorate while he was in his late 20s.
The early groundwork of Beethoven’s training, though extreme, was likely the conduit for extending his musical career. Over the last decade of his life, Beethoven was, in fact, almost completely deaf. Incredibly, it was over the last 15 years of his life that Beethoven wrote some of his most popular pieces.
References
Can children with hearing loss benefit from music and singing?
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-12-musical-affects-speech.html