At 77, Linda White hears all right in one-on-one settings but has problems in noisier situations. “The person could be right beside you, but you still don’t hear them.” White, a retired elementary school teacher and principal, has not gotten hearing aids, although she says she probably will in the future. Instead, she’s part of a group of people testing out a different intervention for dealing with hearing loss: learning music. She is part of an ongoing study organized by Frank Russo, a professor of psychology and director of the Science of Music, Auditory Research and Technology Lab, or SMART Lab, at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Hearing aids can only help so much, because separating speech from noise is not so much a task for our ears as it is for our brains. As people age, something declines along the pathway between the inner ear and the brain’s auditory cortex, explains Russo. “[Although] hearing aids are becoming increasingly remarkable in their ability to suppress noise, they can’t completely correct this problem of [the] aging auditory systems,” Russo says.

Previous research has found that aging musicians fare better than non-musicians when it comes to distinguishing speech from noise, even when their overall hearing is no better than that of non-musicians. So Russo and his colleagues are getting older adults to join a choir, with no musical experience or talent required, and then testing whether it changes how their brains process speech in noisy environments. “We wanted to see how short-term could we make the musical training. How quickly can we see these improvements?” says Ella Dubinsky, a graduate student in the SMART Lab who recruits study participants from among the choir singers. The Ryerson University SMART Lab plans to present some initial findings from their research at a conference on music, sound and health in Boston this summer.

Content by National Public Radio