Enjoying music and media when you suffer from hearing loss

Many people with hearing loss fear that they will never be able to enjoy their favourite music and movies again due to their impairment. But if history’s taught us anything, it’s that you can still appreciate and create music, even when hearing impaired. The famous composer Beethoven was deaf for a large part of his life and still created some of his best and most beautiful symphonies.



These days, better knowledge and improvements in technology mean that it’s even easier for people with hearing impairments to enjoy visual media, movies and music:



Movies – Movie goers can similarly use visual clues to help better understand the sound of the film. In addition, just recently in Australia, the country's four big cinema chains agreed to provide captions on at least one screen in all of their complexes by the end of 2014. These captions (and audio descriptions, for those with visual impairments) will be delivered through portable wireless devices inserted into the cup holders of seats, and cannot be seen by other filmgoers.



Online videos – Using Google’s speech recognition service, YouTube now offers automatic captioning for all videos uploaded. Even if this is not 100% accurate, YouTube also still offers people the option to create captions and subtitles for the movies they upload, and there are many web services that can do it for you if you’re having trouble captioning your video.



Music – Technology and education have made it easier for people with conductive hearing loss or other types of hearing loss to listen to their favourite tracks. Music is a complicated mixture of sounds so for people who have recently been fitted with a hearing aid, it can be difficult in the beginning for the brain to organize the sounds in a meaningful way. But they can train their brain into recognising and ordering sounds so that the tunes sound normal again. Experts suggest listening to simple tunes to start with, like children’s songs, and then gradually moving to more complex songs with more instruments, voices and beats.



Using their other senses can also help a hearing impaired person to enjoy music. Live music such as opera, concerts, gigs, musicals and watching music videos all contain visual cues that might make music more enjoyable. For example, while watching a symphony, seeing the musicians bending and moving with the music can indicate a loud part of the piece, hence making the sounds more meaningful and easy to interpret.



Learn more about deafness and the causes of hearing loss, and the various resources and that are available for individuals that are hearing impaired such as those listed on www.cochlear.com.au