My hearing has been deteriorating for years, probably since my mid-50s.

I had always anticipated that hearing "loss" meant that one would be living in relative silence, but my experience has been exactly the opposite. My problem is a decreasing ability to hear what I want to hear over the increasingly overwhelming muddle of background noise.

It had not occurred to me that individual instruments would be easier to discern than singing voices, but after reading the above, I think that may be true. I have trouble hearing people speak in all but the quietest environments; I'll be checking now to see if I have the same trouble picking up human singing voices, if they're more difficult to hear than instrumental sounds.

Even before I started aging and noticing hearing problems in general, I was NEVER able to carry on conversations while music is playing live (e.g., in bars). Part of it is not wanting to talk BS while I'd rather be listening to music, but I think that I have always found it just too difficult to make out speech while loud, or even moderately-loud, music is competing for my attention.