One doctor's quest to help people with hearing loss enjoy 'all the richness' of music

As a child in Jacksonville, Fla., Alex Chern built string instruments out of office supplies and tuned them, stretching rubber bands taut to change their pitch. Starting at age 7, he took violin lessons and continued playing all the way through college at Yale University. He loved playing Beethoven, expressive pieces written in F major like “Romance No. 2” or the “Spring Sonata,” and technically challenging pieces like Bach’s “Sonatas and Partitas,” where chords left a violinist no room for error.

In medical school at Vanderbilt University, however, Chern was so busy that his violin sat untouched in his closet until one afternoon in his third year. On a lunch break during one of his clinical rotations, he was sitting in the cafeteria reading the school’s newsletter when he stopped, struck by an article on the first page. Reyna Gordon, a young neuroscientist who’d also received a degree in vocal arts, was starting a music cognition lab.

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