A science blog with Eric Berger

Study: Lifetime musicians hear better in older age



Canadian scientists gathered one group of 74 musicians — defined as someone who started musical training by the age of 16, regularly practiced, and had an equivalent of at least six years of formal music lessons — and a group of 89 people who had never played a musical instrument.

Each of the participants was asked to perform several hearing tests in a soundproof room, including pure tone threshholds and speech-in-noise, to determine if there were differences between the two groups.

The study, published in Psychology and Aging, found that in three of the four tests, being a musician conferred a benefit.

Kyrgyz musicians in Karakol: Set up for great hearing in old age. (Wikimedia)

For example, in the test of being able to understand speech in a noisy environment, by age 70 the average musician was able to understand speech in a noisy environment as well as an average 50-year-old non-musician.

The implication is that a life’s worth of practice and work in music helps significantly prevent the erosion of auditory systems in the brains of musicians.

As I haven’t touched an instrument since the French horn (second chair of two chairs) in seventh grade, I guess I’m pretty much out of luck.

Eric Berger

16 Responses

  1. StanleyS says:

    Interesting. So it’s not a matter of preventing deterioration of hearing itself, but of preserving data processing capability. I find it believable.

  2. Miz RD says:

    How does this acuity of the trained ear/brain compensate for damage to hearing itself from years in loud orchestras or bands?

  3. gjh says:

    They don’t say how GOOD you had to be in some instrument for it to count. Maybe a lifetime of really, really mediocre piano playing will help me.

    Probably the listening to Van Halen at 9.5 in my youth will be a greater influence on my ears.

  4. Me says:

    That’s interesting. I always thought my 9 years of having a tuba blast in my ear would make my hearing worse.

    I have noticed that I hear higher pitched sounds better than people my age or younger. (I’m 33.) I guess that makes sense in light of this study.

    Since loss of hearing tends to run in the males in my family (of which I am one), maybe my years of band and choir will compensate for it as I get older.

  5. Jeff says:

    I’m sure death metal musicians weren’t included in this story. :) However, a friend of mine who repairs guitars as part of his living is fond of telling people the best way to store any instrument is not in a case, but on a stand, preferably near a sound source. He claims the vibrations are better for the instrument than the silent darkness inside the guitar case.

    I’m going to guess that flexing any muscle helps to build resilience as you grow older and that includes the ear and the parts of the brain built for auditory response. It makes sense. Despite some hearing loss in my right ear from standing to the left of rather loud drummers for many years, I still perceive certain things audibly much more acutely, I’ve noticed, than friends who aren’t musicians. Depending on what I’m listening to, that can be a blessing or a curse.

  6. M4 says:

    Thanks, Eric, for posting on this topic. It’s been recognized for years that to an extent the adult brain is plastic. Regions that are frequently used for high-level sensory functions or cognitive tasks may actually expand slightly in volume or become more complex in cellular and synaptic structure. Such changes are believed to correspond with improved abilities on the practiced tasks. The challenge now is to follow this and other similar functions over time, to see whether deliberate practice provides a larger “reserve” without actually slowing age- or disease-related declines, or whether practice can actually slow degenerative changes themselves. Even if deliberate practice in the long run provides only a modest benefit for brain aging, the joy of being able to do something well is probably valuable in its own right.

  7. JohnD says:

    Does the study include people playing air guitar?

    • Bruce R says:

      With air guitar you have a problem with confounding. Is it the air guitar, or is it the alcohol producing the effect? Since the former is usually accompanied by the latter.

  8. NoWhining says:

    …either that or musicians as a group tend to hear better than non-musicians.

  9. Bill in Houston says:

    I wonder what the study had to say about garage band musicians from the 70s?

    • ghost of Lowell George says:

      they probably found it impossible to find any 70′s garage guys who could actually remember their, ehr, garage period. i think…

  10. flypusher says:

    What if you’re sitting in front of trumpet players?

  11. Jim says:

    . . . probably means you missed a war or 2, farm machinery,
    heavy construction machinery, confined and noisy spaces,
    starvation, football, basketball, disease,
    Conan the Barbarian, and insects in your ears, etc., etc.

  12. Tom2572 says:

    They used musicians in the study, but really this would apply to anyone who “flexes” their auditory cognitive muscles more than average over their lifetime. And sorry to all you rock gods, but this applies more to classically trained musicians who are trained to listen to subtleties within sound and respond to them. It’s the difference between hearing a sound and liking it versus hearing a sound and understanding it. For instance, when you listen to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, you hear, well, strings. When I hear Adagio for Strings, I hear violins, violas, cellos and bass, and could tell you if the 2nd violin was slightly out of tune on a certain note. The cognitive muscles I use to do that are only slightly removed from the ones used to make out a certain voice in a crowded restaurant. It’s just trained muscles though and nothing special about it. I’m sure you could do a study regarding eyesight where architects would come out on top in old age since they can look at a blueprint and “see” a structure where all I see is a bunch of lines on a large piece of paper.

  13. [...] that you say? Musicians hear better in old age than non-musicians? I figure all that time I’ve spent standing in front of [...]