Ahhh, hearing tests, a fave cudgel of naysaying pseudo scientists both far and wide.
Granted, tests do in fact produce information but the important question is what does that information show. Well beeps, which are currency of such tests , don’t occur much in nature, and since successful evolution involves dealing with nature, hearing or not hearing beeps is really not something we have evolved to do. What we have gotten very good at doing, and this is very important, is pulling salient information out of noisy backgrounds better than anyone else ( as an example predators generally don’t announce their presence with a warning beep like a truck backing up ...so if you fail this auditory test your evolutionary line quickly becomes a dead end ).
So here is a study that looks at something that I call functional hearing, the stuff that, I would suggest played a big role in getting us here as a species, and coincidentally the stuff that today helps allow some of us to routinely hear the differences that cable can make.
"Standard hearing tests had shown that the musicians’ ears weren’t any more sensitive than those of the other listeners. But Kraus knew that their brains, shaped by years of training, had become very good at a similar task:
"A musician will be listening to the sound of his own instrument even though many other instruments are playing," she says, a skill not unlike separating one voice from a crowd of voices.
Kraus wanted to know whether this skill helps musicians pick out a particular voice the same way they pick out a particular instrument. "And resoundingly it does," she says."
....and here is some science providing some cold hard facts to explain....
"Tests show that certain sounds produce stronger electrical signals in a musician’s brain stem, Kraus says. And, she says, these signals offer a more accurate representation of pitch, timing and tone quality — three things that help us pick out a single voice in a noisy room. "
...and here in a nutshell is an interesting contrast and comparison between the beep test and room test....
"A third study by scientists from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, found that musicians could detect harmonies that were slightly off-key even when they had lost most of their hearing. Factory workers with similar hearing loss could not.
Results like these make sense if you think about the brain and the hearing system as if they were muscles, says Dr. Mark Jude Tramo, a professor of neurology at Harvard and director of the Institute for Music & Brain Science.
Tennis players tend to be good arm wrestlers because they have strong forearms, Tramo says. In much the same way, he says, a musician who exercises certain parts of the brain "is going to be able to do better on any task that involves auditory concentration."
Bottom line, it seems if you put some effort into active listening you are much more capable at listening than if you are a , uhhh, drive-by listener.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113938566
