Does playing music lead to less age-related hearing problems or do people without hearing problems continue to play music?

Hearing studies have shown that trained musicians have highly developed auditory abilities compared to non-musicians but a new study concludes hearing abilities in musicians and non-musicians differs, across the age spectrum from 18 to 91 years of age, and that musicians retain a keener ability to  detect and discriminate acoustic information from the environment.

The investigators set out to determine if lifelong musicianship protects against normal hearing decline in later years, specifically for central auditory processing associated with understanding speech. Hearing problems are prevalent in the elderly, who often report having difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background noise. Scientists describe this as the "cocktail party problem". 

In the study, 74 musicians (ages 19-91) and 89 non-musicians (ages 18-86) participated in a series of auditory assessments. A musician was defined as someone who started musical training by the age of 16, continued practicing music until the day of testing, and had an equivalent of at least six years of formal music lessons. Non-musicians in the study did not play any musical instrument.

Wearing insert earphones, participants sat in a soundproof room and completed four auditory tasks that assessed pure tone thresholds (ability to detect sounds that grew increasingly quieter); gap detection (ability to detect a short silent gap in an otherwise continuous sound, which is important for perceiving common speech sounds such as the words that contain "aga" or ata"); mistuned harmonic detection (ability to detect the relationship between different sound frequencies, which is important for separating sounds that are occurring simultaneously in a noisy environment); and speech-in-noise (ability to hear a spoken sentence in the presence of background noise).

They found that being a musician did not offer any advantage in the pure-tone thresholds test, across the age span. However, in the three other auditory tasks – mis-tuned harmonic detection, gap detection and speech-in-noise – musicians showed a clear advantage over non-musicians and this advantage gap widened as both groups got older. 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, suggesting that lifelong musicianship can delay this age-related decline by 20 years.

Most importantly, the three assessments where musicians demonstrated an advantage all rely on auditory processing in the brain, while pure-tone thresholds do not. This suggests that lifelong musicianship mitigates age-related changes in the brains of musicians, which is probably due to musicians using their auditory systems at a high level on a regular basis. In other words, "use it or lose it".

The study was led by Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute in Toronto and is published in the Psychology and Aging.