Effects of Short-term Choir Participation on Auditory Perception in Hearing-aided Older Adults.

Plain-language summary

Hearing loss has been associated with decreased emotional wellbeing and reduced quality of life in aging adults. Although hearing aids can target aspects of peripheral hearing loss, persistent perceptual deficits are widely reported. One prevalent example is the loss of the ability to perceive speech in a noisy environment, which severely impacts quality of life and goes relatively unremediated by hearing aids. Musicianship has been shown to improve aspects of auditory processing, but has not been studied as a short-term intervention for improving these abilities in older adults with hearing aids. The current study investigates whether short-term choir participation can improve three aspects of auditory processing: perception of speech in noise, pitch discrimination, and the neural response to brief auditory stimuli (frequency following response; FFR). Sixty hearing aided older adults (aged 50+) recruited from the Greater Toronto Area will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a choir singing class (n=20), a music appreciation class (n=20), and a do-nothing control group (n=20). Choir participants will take part in a singing class for 14 weeks, during which they will take part in group singing (2 hours/week) supported by individual online musical training (1 hour/week). Participants will undergo pre- and post-training assessments, conducted during the first week of the choir class and again after the last week. Participants in the music appreciation class will be involved in 14 weeks of music listening classes, and the do-nothing control group will not engaged in an active intervention. All participants will undergo the same battery of assessments, measured before and after the 14-week time frame. Auditory assessments (speech perception in noise and pitch discrimination tests) will be administered electronically, and the FFR will be obtained using electroencephalography (EEG). Each of the four assessment sessions (two pre-training, two post-training) will last approximately 1.5 hours, for a total of 6 hours of data collection. The goal of this research is to investigate whether short-term musical training will result in improved auditory outcomes for older adults with hearing aids. It is predicted that the choir singing group will demonstrate the greatest improvements across all auditory measures, and that both the choir singing and musical appreciation groups will experience greater improvements than the do-nothing control group.

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