Hearing loss is a common and natural part of aging, though it can also be noise-induced. Much research has shown that those most at risk for noise-induced hearing loss are people who work in construction, farming and other loud environments, or are musicians. But a recent study has suggested that lifelong musicians – those who have played an instrument since age 9 or younger and play at least three times per week – are less likely to have hearing loss than their non-musician counterparts.
The study, which was done by Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory and recently published in PLoS One, examined the hearing of 18 musicians and 19 non-musicians – people with less than three years of music training – between the ages 45 and 65. The musicians were better able to hear speech in noisy environments, scored higher on auditory memory and had better auditory temporal processing skills, which are part of how people understand speech sounds.
According to Nina Kraus, the study’s co-author and a biologist and director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, the instrument of choice does not matter.
“It is really the act of engagement of playing the instrument that matters,” she said in a 2011 NPR interview.
However, Kraus’s study used only people whom researchers found to have normal hearing, which is important because the differences accounted for were in how the musicians used their auditory abilities, not if they could hear. This study could have future research implications and might also influence the activities people do or have their children engage in.
“What we do with our time and how we engage our senses and our thinking seems to really shape the people we become in very basic ways — in ways that [affect] how our senses work,” she said.
