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Ear Protection is Hearing Conservation

It’s easy to be cavalier about the kind of failings typically considered to be the domain of the aging, but any degree of hearing loss is detrimental to your enjoyment of all the rest of your life. If not due to reasons of age or physical disability, then any hearing loss is generally because of lifestyle or work; meaning that you can easily take steps to preserve the quality hearing that you currently do enjoy.

All who play or work in the music industry – pop/rock to classical musicians, recording and sound engineers, on-stage techs and road crew – your special sense of sound and music is what sets you apart from the average Joe. Therefore, it makes sense that you should actively protect this most important and valuable asset. The ability to maintain your livelihood may be dramatically altered by hearing loss, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), hyperacusis (loudness intolerance), diplacusis (difficulty in pitch perception) and other changes in auditory function.

Research, as well as intuition, tells us that musicians are at risk of auditory damage resulting from exposure to high decibel levels, whether performing live on stage, during rehearsal in a small and closed environment, or even when attending other bands’ performances. Musicians are exposed, on average, to levels of 95dBA and peak levels of 110-120dBA during a musical performance.

New Zealand’s Occupational Safety and Health regulations recommend that a limit of 85dB should not be exceeded, if exposed continuously for eight hours per day. As a guide, 85dB is about the loudness of a food blender or city traffic. For every increase of 3dB, that exposure period should be halved to avoid damage.

This means you should not be exposed to 85dB for more than 8 hours, or 88dB for more than 4 hours, or 91dB for just 2 hours, and so on. If you are at a live concert – which typically plays about 95dB or louder – the exposure time limit should be less than one hour IF no hearing protection is worn. Can you imagine what you’ve been putting your ears through?

And then there are the music lovers, followers of sound; all the concert-goers, DJs, clubbers and anyone who spend their life plugged into their MP3 players, usually at excessive volume levels. When someone sitting next to you on the train frowns at you while you’re movin’ to the music, there’s a good chance your music is so loud it’s leaking through your headphones and interrupting their book reading. Even if you don’t care about them or their book, spare a thought for your poor eardrums –sustained excessive noise levels are directly responsible for hearing loss.

What’s worse, the hearing loss is insidious. It creeps up on you, until one day you can’t hear certain things, then, just as suddenly, you can’t hear most things. Despite today’s ready availability of information on hearing loss, and the pervasive loud music we are generally subjected to whenever we go and have a good time – there is very little concern about hearing conservation/prevention.

Conventional (cheap) earplugs or foam/wax plugs will just muffle the music quality, which is why some people prefer to not wear anything. But if you are a musician, or just a music/quality sound lover, there are hearing protection products that will provide a flat attenuation (ie. equal reduction in sound across all frequencies), preserve the quality of the music, keep speech more understandable and will importantly reduce the level of dangerous exposure to the ears.

Ensuring you have the right level of sound protection while you are busy doing what you love need not cost an arm and a leg, you can best think of it as an insurance for your future. Ask your grandfather how difficult it is to communicate with others without his hearing aids – and be warned, your granddad’s hearing aids might have been paid for by ACC, yours won’t be. Today ACC will not pay for noise-induced hearing loss, especially if they consider it your own fault.

Quality hearing protection is a whole lot cheaper than hearing aids.
 

Thomas Muller