A study at Northwestern University in Chicago revealed that people who are in the music field benefit from better hearing as they age. This does not apply to rock performers and other musicians whose music is played with loud amplification. Apparently, those of us who do not spend a significant portion of our time in and around music have a harder time discerning conversations they hear on TV, in restaurants, at shopping malls, etc. Apparently playing and listening to music trains our ears to better distinguish between different pitches and helps us separate words from background noise. The difference is fairly significant – musicians on average have a 40% better chance of understanding what someone is saying in a noisy situation.
Fortunately for our reverse mortgage clients, their tastes in music tend toward the more traditional. But their children, the baby boomers, are turning into seniors, and we may wish we had obeyed our parents when they told us to “turn that music down.”
Jimbo King