Loud Music

Uhm, not quite. The problem is much bigger than you might think. Damage can be suffered at a young age, but not show it’s ugly effects til middle age. Invest in good, preferably custom, hearing protection.

Tinnitus or ringing in your ears is no joke and the biggest taboo in the music industry. Nobody talks about it but EVERYBODY suffers from it to one degree or another.

It’s your life and ears, but mu advice is, protect them both.

Everybody is everybody. If you go to even *one* loud concert and you leave with dull ears and a ringing sound? That’s ear damage. Under normal conditions your ears don’t ring…that isn’t their base state. Is it permanent damage? No. But it *is* damage. Do that enough times, even rarely, and you *will*cause permanent damage to your ears. Vintage was talking on a long timeline. Dem the facts jack.

As a mobile DJ I try to still be able to ~JUST~ hear the people talking. Generally about 90-100dB at the speaker. Oh, and that image above is from http://www.dangerousdecibels.org/education/information-center/decibel-exposure-time-guidelines/

Everybody does get hearing damage, all of our ears slowly lose there sensitivity over years. Hence why children have a better ability at hearing frequencies them us older folks.

Every persons hearing degrades at different speeds. So any loud sounds can speed up this process or worse still tinnitus or other related hearing issues.

I fear for all these kids I see on the train with their Dre Beats so loud I can hear the words.

The fact of the matter is, look after your ears, get moulds, get defenders, turn it down a bit. People need to start listening again and not just hearing. If you don’t your the fool jack!

If you want to have a prolonged DJ career then you will look after those bits of gold attached to your head!

as for damage, ringing after one gig that goes away. imagine a wheat field, or field full of long grass. we have something similar inside our ears, every stalk of grass picks up a different frequency from the 20hz – 20khz range. when we hear that ringing, its the same as if a powerful storm had blown through the field overnight, pushing all the grass/wheat down to the ground, when our ears recover and the ringing goes away, its because those grass/wheat stalks, have ‘stood up’ again. unbent themselves. if you get perminant damage, those wheat/grass stalks have snapped and then they’re gone forever. they don’t grow back. the reason you hear a ‘tone’ when a group of these stalks are touching the ground, is because thats the mechanism used to send the electric signals to our brains to tell our brains that we are hearing something.

sound goes in the ear, the shape of the ear directs the sound toward the eardrum, in the right way, for different frequencies. the eardrum (thin skin membrane) takes the alternating pressure of the soundwave and reduces the intensity of this wave, reproducing it on the other side of the eardrum as a smaller, less intense, less disruptive wave, like turning down the volume on your sound system. eventually these pressure waves reach the sillia (? – I forget the exact word) hairs – i.e. the fields of grass, that respond only to the frequencies that relate to each patch of grass. they respond by flatting/bending so the tip of the grass touches the ground its coming out of, this in turn sends a corresponding electrical signal to the brain and so on.

when people get hearing loss, especially those with a long history of working in call centres, what they actually lose are the hairs that relate to the sibillance (? I forget the exact word) range – i.e. the frequencies that carry the ‘Puh Kuh Tah Sss, etc’ sounds that we make when we talk, and also sometimes the phone range of frequencies 800hz-2khz and in particular 1.25khz. without the transient ‘puh kuh, etc’ sounds it becomes difficult – impossible to hear when one word ends and another starts as people are talking to you, it begins so sound like a blurred out slurring together of what once was a sentence. this is the most common form of hearing loss, and it effects our abilities to hear speech, but not so much affecting our abilities to hear music, which is also why its often not noticed straight away.

if your ears are bleeding, you’ve ruptured the eardrum, unlike the sillia (?) hairs, your eardrum can heal itself though.

Peace.