Why is it Difficult to Listen to Music with Hearing Aids?

Although being able to understand and communicate is an important reason to get hearing aids, this isn’t the only factor most patients consider when making the purchase. Listening to music at high volumes can be detrimental to hearing, but many people just want to feel and experience music more deeply. Unfortunately, hearing aids often distort the sound of music, making the experience inaccurate or even uncomfortable for many.

Given the importance of music in people’s lives, why don’t hearing aids provide a better music-listening experience?

Ultimately, hearing aids are designed to processes speech, rather than music.

Because hearing aids are primarily used to increase the understanding of human speech and facilitate conversations, they are not yet capable of accurately processing most forms of music. Considering how different music is from spoken speech, it’s difficult to design a hearing aid that takes into account different sounds.

Music has great complexity and range of frequencies

Just think about listening to a symphony or opera. Normally there are many instruments or voices involved in making music, which all produce sound in a different way at many different frequencies. Most people only have a vocal range covering a few octaves, while many instruments are capable of spanning four or more octaves (even a piano has over eight octaves). In addition, all people use the same ´vocal instrument´ to produce speech. 

Since music produces much higher and lower frequencies, hearing aids do not usually take this into account and may even filter out some of those sounds as background noise.

Music decibels vary greatly from those decibels produced during speech

Not only that, the decibel range between a normal human voice and music varies greatly. Even shouting at someone standing just a foot away doesn’t usually exceed 88 decibels. Normal conversations range from 60 to 70 decibels when standing one to three feet away. Compared to a rock concert, which can get up to 120 decibels or more, the noise created by normal conversations is different from the noise produced by music. Even a solo instrument usually generates over 80 decibels. Hearing aids aren’t designed to accurately transmit such a wide variety of sounds because it would interfere with recognizing and transmitting speech. 

The digital dilemma: A/D converters 

According to AARP, 90 percent of the hearing aids people use today are digital. While digital hearing aids are smaller and allow for more flexibility when it comes to music, they have a fatal flaw – they use an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter. Typically, the A/D converter in hearing aids can only handle 85 decibels, even though the microphone can work to even 118 decibels. When the decibels exceed what the A/D converter is able to handle, and most music does, an overload occurs which causes the sound to distort.

Despite these complications, audiologists are aware of musicians and the needs of music lovers. Therefore, it is not surprising to see audiologists work hard to bring out the novel technologies almost every year.