Programming hearing instruments to make live music more enjoyable

on the perception of speech in many different environments, hearing healthcare providers may sometimes overlook other signals, such as music, that may be very meaningful to the patient. Because hearing instruments are designed to focus on speech, music lovers and musicians are often disappointed by the sound quality of music. Settings and electroacoustic characteristics of hearing instruments may be ideal for speech signals, but not for music.1 As a result, hearing instruments may react inappropriately when music is present, since there are many acoustic differences between speech and music. A hearing aid that has been optimized to handle music as an input should have both software and hardware differences from other instruments. Bernafon has developed Live Music Plus, a software program with a dedicated combination of features for live music processing, which is available in its Veras and Vérité 9 hearing instrument families. In this