Did you know that listening to mp3 music can mess with your brain, and your voice?

I love my digital music. But I make sure I listen to CDs and high definition recordings, too.

Why? Because I know from personal experience that we can train our brains to stop paying attention to certain frequencies, and that’s BAD news – for our brains and our voices.

In last week’s article, I talked about how we don’t hear our own voices accurately. This is another piece of that important discussion.

When I had to stop performing as a singer, part of the reason was because I actually could not hear my own voice accurately in the heart of the soprano range. When I sang, I heard my voice as matching pitch with the piano, or another singer – but I wasn’t. Here’s the freaky part: I could hear that I was flat if I heard a recording of myself – just not while I was singing.

I found out how to fix that when I read about the work of Dr. Alfred Tomatis in a singing magazine. I had to re-train my brain’s ability to perceive all the frequencies in my own voice.

I had an audiogram at the beginning of my listening retraining program that showed a dip in my hearing at 2,000 hz in both ears.

After my listening program, that dip was gone. So was my inability to hear when I was singing flat. (I still had to retrain all the bad muscle habits that made me flat, but that’s another story. I couldn’t have fixed those without restoring my brain’s ability to hear my own voice accurately again.)Continue Reading