Careful listening and pitch training may help reduce the effects of hearing loss, according to research at Ryerson University in Toronto.
...[O]ne way we follow a particular voice is by locking onto its pitch, allowing us to use frequency as an anchor. "When we're listening to voices and speech, there's a frequency trail we can follow, but it's often buried under a din of noise. But if our brains have improved in tracking that anchor, we can better reconstruct the nuance of each speech fragment," he says. "So that's the presumed mechanism for why this pitch training is so important."