Music Induced Hearing Loss

A professional musician is a performing artist and like a professional ballerina is prone to dance related injury, so too is a musician prone to injury of the vocal cords if s/he uses voice and of course injury to the ear and damage to hearing. 

The DamagePhysiological - Each inner ear comprises of approximately 15,500 hair cells or nerve endings arranged by frequency. When sound waves stimulate the cells, they convert vibrations into electrical currents which our hearing nerves carry to the brain.Exposure to hazardous sound causes metabolic and physical change leading to permanent cell damage. Generally the cells responsible for responding to soft high frequency sounds are damaged first which impacts on your ability to hear speech in noise and pick up soft sounds like /s/ &/sh/. 

The Human Element

...Know that my noblest faculty, my hearing, has greatly deteriorated......How sad is my lot, I must avoid all things that are dear to me......Oh how happy I should be if my hearing were completely restored, then I would hurry to you......Of course, I am resolved to rise above every obstacle, but how will it be I?......I beg of you to keep the matter of my deafness a profound secret to be confided to nobody, no matter whom...Letter of Beethoven to Karl Amenda, one of his closest friends, dated July 1st 1801

There is no doubt that hearing damage comes with its bag of emotional barriers - fear, stress and anxiety - especially when a career is threatened or compromised. In addition to analysing and treating measureable properties of your hearing, support to address you as an individual is paramount. 

TREATMENT

“Cubex brought my career back to life.” - Rod Franks

There is no single formulae.

Each musician is different, belonging to different genres, each with specific needs, different abilities and exposed to a variety of environments so treatment plans are designed around your individual needs.For us, the journey with a musician is very engaged and involves many sessions of active and structured listening experiences. 

Treatment technology for music appreciation

Hearing treatment technology is generally designed for improving access to speech sound because spoken communication is arguably the most important thing we need to be able to listen to in order to get on in life. For many musicians however, hearing music is as important as hearing speech. However, the spectrum of music differs significantly from the phonetics of speech, the basis for most modern amplification approaches. The good news is that at Cubex, we know how to work around this and have worked with so many amazing musicians to achieve listening success.