When you have hearing loss, there’s a lot you miss out on. Left untreated, you might not be able to hear birds chirping, have conversations with your grandchildren or enjoy listening to music like you once did. Fortunately, hearing aids can help.
How Hearing Loss Affects Listening to Music
There’s nothing like hearing your favorite local band play at Miller Theater. But when you have hearing loss, it can make it difficult to hear very high or very low notes, distinguish between instruments or make out the lyrics.
If you’re missing out on the music listening experience, it’s important to discuss it with your audiologist. They can fit you with hearing aids that have special programming abilities so you can enjoy listening to music once again.
Hearing Aid Music Programming
With hearing aids specially designed for music listeners, you can use a remote or smartphone app to change the programming on your device to one suited for live music. This program will pick up on a wider range of frequencies than a program designed for speech, and adjust the amplification accordingly.
Why Amplifying Music Can Be Challenging
If you wear hearing aids that are old or outdated, there’s probably a lot to be desired when it comes to listening to music.
Older hearing aids that don’t have music programming abilities are designed primarily to amplify speech sounds. Because music has a much wider frequency and volume range than speech, very high and very low sounds are not picked up or amplified correctly in these outdated models.
In addition, the environments where music is playing often have a lot of background noise, and it can be a challenge for these devices to distinguish between what noises are desirable and which aren’t.
Many people with these older devices make the mistake of turning up the volume to better hear the music. This rarely helps; since music has a wide dynamic range, the result is distorted sound at a level that could cause further hearing damage.
For more information about today’s hearing devices or to schedule an appointment with a hearing aid expert to talk about upgrading your device, call Augusta ENT today!