A hearing study of experienced musicians found they had a better chance than non-musicians of avoiding the hearing loss associated with aging. Christie Nicholson reports.

Some people may be protected from the hearing loss that often accompanies aging: yes, musicians. Scientists gave hearing tests to 74 musicians and 89 non-musicians. For the study, musicians had to be playing since at least age 16, and have a minimum of six years formal training.

Scientists tested: gap detection, the ability to hear brief breaks in continuous sound; mistuned harmonic detection, the ability to discern frequencies; speech in noise, the ability to hear conversation against a noisy background; and pure tone thresholds, this is the ability to hear tones as they get quieter.

Musicians had no advantage when it came to pure tone thresholds. But they performed significantly better in all other tests. The work is in the journal Psychology and Aging.

The three tests in which musicians have an advantage all rely on higher-level processing in the brain, as opposed to analyzing input at the level of the ear. Which suggests that musical training makes the brain better at filtering sound.

—Christie Nicholson

一個關(guān)于老練音樂家們的聽力測試發(fā)現(xiàn)，他們比非音樂家有更好的機會避免隨著年齡增長喪失聽力。克里斯蒂·尼克爾森如是報道。

有些人能夠免受伴隨著年老的記憶喪失：是的，音樂家?？茖W(xué)家對74個音樂家和89個非音樂家做了聽力測試。在這個研究中，音樂家是不得不至少從16歲開始一直演奏，最少有六年的正式訓(xùn)練的。

科學(xué)測試：間隙檢測，在連續(xù)的語音中聽簡短的中斷的能力；走調(diào)諧音檢測，辨別頻率的能力；噪音中的演講，在嘈雜背景下聽會話的能力；純音閾值，在他們安裝消聲器時聽口音。

當(dāng)涉及純音閾值時音樂家沒有優(yōu)勢。但他們在所有其他測試中明顯表現(xiàn)的更好。這項工作在《心理與老年》期刊里。

音樂家有優(yōu)勢的三個測驗都依賴于大腦中的高水平處理，根據(jù)對照聽覺水平輸入的分析。那就表明音樂訓(xùn)練使大腦能夠更好的過濾語音。

—克里斯蒂·尼克爾森