The expression “Music to my ears” could soon have an entirely different meaning to people suffering from hearing impairment.
Exposing children to music can have a beneficial impact on hearing as is highlighted by a joint study carried out by the University College London and the University of Helsinki.
Gauging Speech-in-Noise Performance
Researchers looked at 43 young children in a 14 to 16 month study where they measured speech-in-noise performance. Of those enrolled, 21 children had cochlear implants, while the other 22 had normal hearing ability. The researchers recognized that children with implants had a difficult time understanding speech so they introduced control and test sets which delegated participants to singing and non-singing groups.
The results showed a significant improvement in awareness and speech-in-noise performance for youngsters in the singing group versus their counterparts in the non-singing group.
The Ears Are Trained by Music
This study is just the latest in a long line of research initiatives that demonstrate the advantages of musical training to improve cognitive ability and speech processing. In noisy environments, speech perception can be improved by musical training, and these results were corroborated by a study carried out by the Montreal Neurological Institute
That study analyzed the brain activity of 30 participants, 15 musicians and 15 non-musicians, asking each to identify speech syllables through a variety of background noise levels.
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 necessarily hearing impaired, the difference in results among those who were trained musically and those who weren’t was considerable.
Musicians Outperform Non-Musicians
The two groups performed equally under conditions without any noise, but the musicians would distinguish themselves as the study went on, outperforming non-musicians at all other signal-to-noise ratios. It’s likely that the ability to perform well on these tests was due to enhancements to the left interior frontal and right auditory parts found within the brains of the musicians.
But the advantages of musical training revealed by Drs. Yi and Robert’s study don’t simply end there. According to the study’s findings, musical training strengthened the participant’s auditory-motor network, fine-tuning and uniting the auditory system and speech motor system to improve hearing.
It’s important to note that while the musicians observed were adults, they all began their musical education at a much younger age and accumulated at least a decade of musical training. Musical training has a profound effect and this again backs that fact.
The Impact of Hearing Loss on Beethoven
Some of the world’s most distinguished musicians and composers have struggled with hearing loss. Most notably, Ludwig van Beethoven who began to lose his hearing in his 20’s.
Though Beethoven’s young childhood musical training would be considered extreme by present standards, the foundation of the training may have been the gateway to prolonging his career as a composer. As a matter of fact, Beethoven actually lived the last decade of his life nearly totally deaf. Amazingly, it was over the last 15 years of his life that Beethoven wrote some of his most renowned works.