By Saul Moshé Steinberg
and Dr. Frank Russo
This is a reproduction of an article that was originally published in RSPP Newsletter (June, 2015):
Many
older adults who experience little difficulty hearing in quiet environments
will report having trouble understanding speech in the presence of competing
background noise. This is often first noticed when attempting to follow a
conversation at a large social gathering, in which many people are talking at
the same time. While amplifying the audio signal through a modern digital
hearing aid equipped with noise reduction can often go a long way towards
correcting the problem, in many cases there is still a residual difficulty that
persists. Part of the problem may lie in age-related changes in the brain. 
Specifically,
many older adults experience a degradation of neural timing in brain mechanisms
responsible for encoding the pitch of the voice. Being able to follow the pitch
of a speaker's voice helps to alert the listener to conversational cues,
particularly in noisy situations. Several researchers have recently proposed
the idea that musical engagement may be a means of supporting this neural
timing. Research has found that musicians show significantly less age-related
decline in their ability to detect speech in noise as compared to
non-musicians. Further, studies have shown that musicians demonstrate more
precise neural timing as compared to non-musicians. Actively engaging in music
requires the ability to track and discriminatemultiple sources of complex sounds, just as a listener must do when attending to a single voice among many. However, studies have not shown that being a musician directly increases the neural timing of sound. So far studies have only shown that musicians happen to show more accurate neural timing than non-musicians.
For
our current study, we are interested in determining whether older adults with
mild hearing loss can show improvements in their ability to understand speech
in noise as a result of short-term musical training. Specifically, we are
testing the effects of singing training through group choir lessons. Since
January of 2015, 14 older adults have attended weekly choir sessions over a
13-week period. Participants were also required to complete one hour of
homework per week, through the use of online music training software, designed
to aid users to improve voice pitch control. So far, the results are very
promising. There has been significant improvement in the ability to perceive
speech in noise as a result of the choir training. In addition, participants
have shown improvement in their ability to discriminate pitch, which is
important for tracking speaking voices. These preliminary findings suggest that
short-term musical training is able to mitigate some of the age-related
difficulty in hearing that is experienced by older adults.
