Music Lover? Follow These Tips to Reignite Your Love of Music.

Those with hearing impairments miss out on meaningful conversations and entertainment programs, and they are less productive at work and at greater risk for depression and other medical problems. In fact, many of my patients tell me the thing they miss the most is the ability to listen to and enjoy music.

Even among those with hearing aids, music can be an elusive pleasure. Though hearing aids have continued to advance technologically from year to year, music processing provides a special challenge.

I have learned that music is much different than human speech in that it has tonal qualities and includes a greater dynamic range than human voices. Additionally, though it’s important for hearing aids to be adapted to accommodate higher frequencies to maximize speech perception, for listening to music, the lower frequencies are the most important. Hearing aids optimized for music should be able to adapt to large dynamic range inputs without distortion and a wide frequency range.

Thankfully, there are a few different ways to remedy this so music lovers with hearing can hear more clearly.
Almost any hearing aid can be configured with a music setting. Below are some of the adjustments I make to her patients’ hearing aids in order to enhance their music listening experience. I tell my patients they will want to return to their normal listening program when they are done listening to music because these changes will not enhance speech understanding.

Feedback reduction system
Oftentimes, music has flute and piano notes, or other high-frequency sounds, that the hearing aid may confuse with feedback because of the tonal nature. When feedback systems try to cancel these sounds, it results in a sound artifact or distortion. For this reason, I recommend patients disable the hearing aids feedback program, to reduce or eliminate this problem.

Noise reduction system
Hearing aids are often programmed to reduce background noise to enable better speech understanding. Music, in contrast, has sustained chords that might be mistaken for background noise and reduced by a noise canceling system. Therefore, a music program may have the noise reduction feature disabled in order to avoid any reduction in amplitude that would affect music listening enjoyment.

Low frequency range
Music often occurs at lower frequencies than those which we use to understand speech. Your music program may be set to amplify an extended range of low frequencies.

Omni-directional microphones
For speech understanding, your hearing aid microphones are often set to directional mode in order to block out background noise and conversations. For music listening, your practitioner will likely set your hearing aid microphones to omni-directional mode. This will pick up music in a surround-sound fashion that will offer the richest listening experience.

With today’s sophisticated, programmable hearing aids, I can customize a program that specifically enhances your music listening experience. I encourage all patients to discuss their love of music with her at the time of purchase so she can implement initial programming and on an ongoing basis as you receive follow-up care.