The phrase “Music to my ears” could soon have an entirely different meaning for people who have hearing impairment.
Exposing children to music can have a worthwhile effect on hearing as is highlighted by a joint study conducted by the University College London and the University of Helsinki.
Evaluating Speech-in-Noise Performance
Speech-in-noise performance was the main measure researchers looked at, putting 43 young children in a clinical study for 14 to 17 months. Of those observed, 21 children had cochlear implants, while the remaining 22 had normal hearing ability. The researchers already knew that children with implants had a difficult time understanding speech so they introduced control and test sets which assigned 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 in comparison with children in the non-singing group.
The Ears Are Trained by Music
There is a great deal of research showing the advantages to cognitive ability and speech processing offered by musical training and this study is just one of them. In noisy settings, speech perception can be enhanced by musical training, and these results were backed by research conducted by the Montreal Neurological Institute
That study evaluated the brain activity of 30 participants, 15 musicians and 15 non-musicians, asking each to identify speech syllables through a number of background noise levels.
The ages of the participants in the study by Drs. Yi and Roberts, unlike the Helsinki/London study, averaged 22 years old. These participants had normal hearing but there was a significant difference in results between the musicians and the non-musicians.
Musicians Outperform Non-Musicians
The two groups performed similarly under conditions with no noise, but the musicians would separate themselves as the study went on, outperforming non-musicians at all other signal-to-noise rates. Musicians have enhanced left interior frontal and right auditory areas of the brain which probably accounts for this ability to perform well on these tests.
But the advantages of musical training revealed by Drs. Yi and Robert’s research don’t just end there. The auditory motor network is fine-tuned and united to the auditory system and speech motor system by this musical training according to this study.
These adult musicians in this study had all been educated when they were younger and had at least ten years of training. This once again supports the recent analysis that musical training can have a profound impact.
The Affect of Hearing Loss on Beethoven
Some of the world’s most celebrated musicians and composers have struggled with hearing loss. Perhaps the most well-known deaf composer, Ludwig van Beethoven was able to hear when he was born, but that started to decline while he was in his late 20s.
Although Beethoven’s young childhood musical education would be considered extreme by current standards, the foundation of the training may have been the gateway to prolonging his career as a composer. Through the last decade of his life, Beethoven was, in fact, almost totally deaf. In spite of that, many of his most beloved pieces came during his last 15 years.
References
Can children with hearing loss benefit from music and singing?
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-12-musical-affects-speech.html