Beethoven’s hearing loss probably helped him develop his style of writing classical music, according to an analysis of the composer's use of high notes. Researchers say it played a major role in his compositions throughout his career. The study comes out of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and is reported in the British Medical Journal. The composer used many a variety of high notes in his early work, but when he first reported losing his hearing for high-frequency notes around age 30, his compositions changed. At first, his compositions relied more on middle and low-frequency notes but as his hearing deteriorated, he composed music in his head and the high notes returned. The researcher say the results are incomplete because they only used a few compositions and did not review the full scope of the Beethovan's work. Read more about the findings
here.
