Tinnitus Sufferers Find Healing Power in Their Favorite Songs
Troubadours, romantics and Bono have all claimed at one point or another that music has the power to heal. They might finally get some backing from the scientific community if a group of researchers in Germany has any say. Researchers from Westfalian Wilhelms-University working with partners at Muenster University Hospital are treating tinnitus – the ringing or other interference experienced by many with noise-related hearing loss – with music that’s custom-tailored to specific patients’ tinnitus symptoms. Recent research determined that a reorganization of the auditory cortex could be the root cause of tinnitus; that is, the part of the brain that makes audible sense of sound has been warped by noise exposure. Other research shows that behavioral training might reverse cortical reorganization. So the group began to “notch” patients’ favorite music to filter out the specific one-octave frequency band of the ringing experienced by the subject. After a year of listening to...