Musicians have better hearing

Interesting article from the BBC about hearing issues.

However the problem they particularly talk about the "cocktail party problem" is one I suffer with badly...  not that I ever go to cocktail parties ;-)

The problem is the inability to pick out speech against the hubbub of background noise.  I really struggle with that - my wife knows it and will sometimes aid me by repeating salient parts of the conversation to me - I'm better one to one but I know that I look at people lips... am I just lip reading?

However to be fair - I'm clearly not a professional musician :-) So maybe I'm outside the influence of this research... I'm not someone who has "never played" and instrument or a professional musician.

I did some years back start wearing earplugs to most concerts - but I've dropped off that a bit, largely as we seem to go to larger venues now, esp The O2 at Greenwich and I find the levels generally less and cause me less short term issues than say places like The Lees Cliff in Folkestone.


Comments

  1. Dominic Rivron13 September 2011 at 23:39

    Pardon?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Liz Hinds15 September 2011 at 20:38

    AS we get older we lose the extremes of our hearing ability and background noise just emphasises that. I know because I went for a hearing test because my children kept saying i was deaf. (I wasn't. Not for my age anyway ...)

    ReplyDelete

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