How to Play a Musical Instrument With Hearing Assistance
Hearing aids have mainly been designed to help you hear speech. Therefore, they don’t work well for listening to or playing music. This is because musical instruments have a far wider frequency range than normal vocal patterns. However, this doesn’t mean that you can’t play an instrument.
Things You'll Need
- A Band-Aid, piece of tape or some gauze
- Your hearing aid
- A musical instrument
- Turn your hearing aid around so that the microphone is facing away from the instrument. This will help to eliminate some of the problematic distortion.
- Turn down your hearing aid’s volume. Turn up the instrument’s volume.
- Cover your hearing aid’s microphone with something that will act as a filter (i.e. a Band-Aid, a piece of tape, some gauze). This will keep some of the sound from reaching the microphone. It will work even if you don’t turn down your hearing aid’s volume. Furthermore, it will also help to decrease some of the distortion while you are playing the instrument.
- Make sure that your hearing aid fits you properly and that your ears are thoroughly clean. This is especially important if you are still suffering from distortion since most regular distortion occurs whenever sound bounces back to your microphone. You may find that this also causes a whistling sound whenever you are playing your instrument.
- Have your audiologist make adjustments to your hearing aid. Take your instrument along to test the adjustments. Your audiologist can measure what frequencies your hearing aid needs to pick up.