Read about this ongoing study organized by Frank Russo, a professor of psychology and director of the Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology Lab, or SMART Lab, at Ryerson University in Toronto, that is testing out a different intervention for dealing with hearing loss: learning music. Previous research has found that aging musicians fare better than non-musicians when it comes to distinguishing speech from noise, even when their overall hearing is no better than that of non-musicians. He says one way we follow a particular voice is by locking onto its pitch, allowing us to use frequency as an anchor. “When we’re listening to voices and speech, there’s a frequency trail we can follow, but it’s often buried under a din of noise. But if our brains have improved in tracking that anchor, we can better reconstruct the nuance of each speech fragment,” he says. “So that’s the presumed mechanism for why this pitch training is so important.”
