Canadian Musician: Hearing aids - How to protect your ears

This article was adapted from "What'd You Say?" which originally appeared in the July 2001 edition of Canadian Musician (Vol. 23, #4). It's posted here with the magazine's permission.

Generally speaking, day-to-day life contains innumerable occasions during which you might damage your hearing. If you also happen to be a musician, your ears are probably also coping with the continual sonic assault of overdrive guitars, pop-and-bang bass lines, and skull-hammering drum solos, all fed through sound systems that have three settings: loud, louder and roof-remover. Given these circumstances, it seems like a good idea to take a look at how to keep your ears in good shape.

Creative considerations
First of all, you need to know a little bit about how the ear works. Sound is directed down the ear canal to the eardrum, causing the drum to vibrate. This sets in motion an intricate series of events in which sound is converted into mechanical energy that then moves into a hydraulic system. This system moves thousands of tiny, hair-like nerve cells, which in turn send off electrical signals to the brain to be translated into the sounds we hear.

Despite the incredible complexity of this process, there is no mechanism that prevents too much sound from entering the ear. When intense sound levels bombard the ear, a couple of bad things begin to happen. The first is acoustic trauma, caused by short and loud bursts of sound such as a gunshot or an explosion. This can result in immediate, severe and permanent hearing loss.

The second is more subtle and not as easy to detect immediately. When your ear is exposed to constant high-decibel sounds, it can cause what's called a temporary threshold shift - the deafness you might have experienced, for example, after leaving a loud rock concert. Another effect you might experience is tinnitus, the ringing in your ears that can last hours or days after being exposed to loud sounds. All these symptoms usually disappear fairly quickly, but if you continually subject your ears to this kind of auditory abuse, the deafness can become permanent.

Essentially, there are two ways to protect your ears. The first, of course, is to turn down the volume. After all, if so many rock musicians are partially deaf (not to mention their sound engineers), then why take the same risk?

The second solution is to wear something that protects your hearing, whether it's the standard, squishy earplugs sold in drugstores or more high-tech, custom-molded devices. As you can see from the chart below, ideally you shouldn't expose your ears to more than half an hour a day of, say, loud music on headphones. And as for band practice, that should be limited to only 15 minutes a day. So get out those earplugs and keep playing!

Daily maximum sound exposure

How loud is loud?
Decibels (dB):
150: jet taking off
140: gun shot
130: rock concert/jackhammer
120: band practice/car stereo
110: dance club/headphones
100: factory
90: subway
80: busy street
70: restaurant
60: conversation

For more information, visit H.E.A.R.. This site is geared towards musicians and contains extensive information on how to gauge whether you're at risk of hearing loss, and what to do if you are.

Back to "How-to" articles