Blindness and musical ability: Chicago Tribune article

[Alex F]

From today's Chicago Tribune:

Blindness linked to music skills
Study says people who lose sight at an early age can detect pitch better

By Andreas von Bubnoff
Tribune staff reporter
Published July 15, 2004

Providing the first hard evidence for the common belief that blind people often have an unusual knack for music, new research has found that people who have been blind from an early age can detect differences in pitch better and faster than people who can see.

Scientists said the study--which appears Thursday in the journal Nature--is an important advance, although the results were not unexpected.

"It is a well-known fact that a lot of blind people become piano tuners or famous musicians," said lead researcher Pascal Belin of the University of Montreal in Canada. "They have a better musical sense."

Belin said it was already known that blind people are better at localizing sound in space, but this is the first evidence that blind people are better at perceiving pitch. The findings also suggest that the developing brain can compensate for lack of visual input early in life by changing its wiring for sound.

"This contributes beautifully to how we understand the field," said Dr. David Ross, a Yale University researcher who also studies blind people's brains but was not involved in Belin's study.

In their experiments, the researchers presented subjects with two tones and asked them to indicate whether the second tone's pitch was higher or lower.

When the test conditions were made more difficult--by decreasing the pitch difference or the duration of the tones--people who had become blind at age 2 or earlier significantly outperformed sighted people.

The enhanced hearing was not observed in people who had become blind at age 5 or later, likely because by then the brain has less flexibility to adapt to injuries or changes in sensory capacity.

"The earlier they became blind, the better they were," Belin said of the subjects' performance in his study.

He said the improved hearing skills occur because areas of the brain normally used for visual input are used for hearing.

"The auditory part of the brain takes over the visual part," he said.

Some scientists cautioned that the improved abilities in hearing skills observed in the study could also be gained by musical training.

"We don't really know what kind of musical training these blind people have that they looked at [in the study]," said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. "I think it would be of similar interest to compare trained musicians in this particular task directly with blind non-musicians to see if they basically perform similarly."

Blind people interviewed this week had mixed opinions about the notion that they may have improved hearing or musical skills. Some reject that, saying they want to be treated like other people, especially when it comes to their career choices.

Traditionally, many blind people were trained in professions like piano tuning at schools for the blind. Now, however, they pursue many other careers, such as computer programming, said Curtis Chong, president of the National Federation of the Blind's computer science department.

Barrie Heaton, secretary of the Association of Blind Piano Tuners in Britain, said the historical prevalence of blind people in his field may have less to do with biology than with government-funded training programs for the blind and with customers who view blind people--perhaps correctly--as more musically talented.

"We do get a lot of people who say they prefer blind piano tuners," Heaton said.

Some blind people said they don't like the stereotype that they have better hearing than sighted people.

"When [people] meet a blind person, they say, `Oh, you must have fantastic hearing,'" said Dan TeVelde, a Chicago musician who has been blind all his life. "I think a lot of times people get tired of hearing that from a sighted person."


Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
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For those of you who may teach students who are blind, how does this square with your experience?

Alex F.

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