Listen to the music

The general consensus is that gentlemen like Keith Richards who have spent a lifetime playing music will have done some damage to their hearing in the process. There may be some cases in which this is the case, such as when the music is heavy metal and amplified to impossible levels. However, a new study has in fact found that musicians have better hearing as they get older than non-musicians.

Previous research has already established that trained musicians have more highly developed auditory abilities than those who have not learned an instrument. This latest research however, was the first to look at hearing ability across the age spectrum and involved subjects aged from eighteen to 91 years of age.

Hearing problems are prevalent in older people. In particular they report what is known to researchers as “the cocktail party problem”, in that they have difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background noise. This is largely due to an age-related decline in the ability of the central auditory processing parts of the brain to differentiate auditory information from the environment. It is not related to wear and tear or otherwise of the ear itself.

In the study 74 musicians aged 19-91 were compared to 89 non-musicians aged 18-86. A musician was defined as someone who started musical training by the age of sixteen, continued music practising until the day of the testing and who had an equivalent of at least six years formal music lessons. People classed as non-musicians did not play any musical instrument.

Participants were asked to wear earphones and sit in a soundproof room and complete four tasked that assessed four aspects of hearing: pure tone threshold (the ability to detect sounds that grow increasingly quieter); gap detection (ability to perceive a short gap in continuous sound which is important for common speech that contains sounds like “aga” or “ata”); mistuned harmonic detection (the ability to detect the relationship between different sound frequencies which is needed to separate sounds occurring simultaneously in a noisy environment); and speech-in-noise detection (the capacity to hear a spoken sentence in the presence of background noise).

The musicians had no advantage in terms of pure tone threshold but had a clear advantage over non-musicians in gap detection, mistuned harmonic detection, and speech-in-noise detection. This advantage increased as the participants got older so that by age 70 the musician was able to understand speech as well in a noisy environment as a 50 year old non-musician. So being a musician effectively delays hearing decline by at least 20 years.

Tellingly, the three areas in which musicians enjoy an advantage all rely on central auditory processing in the brain while pure tone threshold does not. Musicianship then, stops age-related decline in the auditory parts of the brain which is due to musicians using their auditory systems at a high level on a regular basis.

It is another case of use it or lose it, or in this instance, “muse” it or lose it.

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