Get Serious & Prevent Hearing Damage

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What exactly is hearing damage and how can it affect you? As a musician, how does hearing damage happen? How easily can it happen and, more importantly, how can you best prevent or limit its effects? Read on to find out more.

Over the years, almost every musician in the game, from the amateur to professional level will slowly build up hearing damage. Combine the hearing damage that can happen during rehearsals and on stage with the fact that, as your ears get older, your hearing naturally deteriorates, and all of it can have some pretty devastating consequences. Hearing damage can come in a few different forms, of which hearing a continuous high pitched whine (tinnitus) is perhaps one of the worst.

We talk with Erik Kempka (photo left), a pioneering expert within the realm of hearing protection and in-ear monitoring. Erik is the owner of the company InEar Systems and calls a few pretty prominent names his clients. Besides performing artists, Erik also lends his expertise to audio engineers and other technicians and professionals within the music industry. Erik’s interest in hearing protection and in-ear monitoring first started way back, when he was still the guitarist for the band Never Mind.

Hearing Damage

How does hearing damage happen? According to Erik, there are actually a lot of misconceptions about this, especially among musicians. “I often hear musicians saying things like: ‘I’m deaf because my band plays so loud’. While this can be true, if you’re only playing with your band a couple of hours a week and the volume levels are still within pretty reasonable limits, it’s not necessarily going to cause any permanent or even lasting damage. This is especially true if you’re giving your hearing a proper break in between.” Erik explains this further: “Whether or not your hearing suffers lasting damage depends on the total noise exposure you experience on a daily basis. Of course, a sound can be so loud that, even though it doesn’t last very long, it does cause lasting damage. If you hear a short blast of around 140 decibels (decibel is the unit that stands for level of loudness), like if a firework goes off right next to your ear, then it will cause permanent or lasting damage. But volume levels lower than that will only cause damage cumulatively, so if you’re exposed to them constantly throughout an entire day. This cumulative effect applies to all sounds, not just music.”

Roughly speaking, this means that the human ear can tolerate around 80 decibels of noise over a maximum period of 8 hours. When your hearing is exposed for more than 8 hours, then you’re in the hearing damage danger zone. 80 decibels isn’t even that loud. It’s actually around the same noise level as a busy office. To use a mathematical term, the decibel scale is logarithmic. This means that sounds that peak at 83 decibels are actually twice as loud as sounds that peak at 80 decibels. In turn, that means that the human ear can only tolerate 83 decibel noise for around 4 hours a day, and 86 decibel noise for just two hours a day. You can also reason it from the opposite direction. Your ears can easily tolerate noise levels of around 60 decibels (which is about the volume of a normal conversation) for more than 24 hours. And since there are only 24 hours in a day, you can comfortably chat away the day and night without fear of damaging your hearing. “But it’s when you’re exposed to noise levels that peak at 80 decibels or higher that your hearing is at risk,” according to Erik. “Because that’s the level of noise that human hearing can only withstand for short periods of time. The amount of time that you’re exposed to those noise levels also needs to be calculated per day.”

Get Enough Rest

A lot of bands, whether they’re rehearsing or playing a gig, will easily reach the 100 decibel mark. Playing for a couple of hours at that level (without hearing protection) will, by definition, cause hearing loss and it will do it a little bit at a time. So, after a few years or a few decades of playing in bands, at some point you’re definitely going to notice the effects. Always try to rehearse at a lower volume level – so keep the noise level to around 85 to 90 decibels. This will dramatically reduce or even eliminate the chance of permanent hearing loss, just as long as you don’t rehearse for too long.

If you do expose your ears to 80 decibels of noise or more, then make sure to rest them fully in between. Of course, this isn’t an easy task these days, as Erik knows too well: “I sometimes measure the level of noise in the village I live in, just to get an idea of ambient noise. Over a period of twenty years, the ambient noise level has risen from 60 decibels to 70. That’s quite a jump. Apparently, life is only getting noisier and things are only getting louder. Bands are turning up the volume more and more and the sound systems in clubs are getting louder. In short, it’s actually much harder than it used to be to give your ears a rest. Because of what I do, I’m hyper-aware of this and, every time I go to a busy pub, I sometimes even pop in my earplugs.”

Hair Cells

The whole system of human hearing (the ears themselves, the ear canals, the nerves and all of the associated brain functions) is a highly complex phenomenon. “We actually only understand around 25 percent of how hearing works,” Erik admits. “This is a big difference to our understanding of vision, of which we’ve mapped around 80 percent. New discoveries about the human aural system are being made continuously. For example, we haven’t known for all that long that the pituitary gland (located in the middle of the brain) ensures that we don’t hear all of the inner workings of our own body all the time. So the blood rushing through your veins and the beating of your heart.”

When we zoom in on the inner ear, we can see hair cells that seem to be specifically designed for registering sound. Each ear has around 3,500 of these internal hair cells that respond to every frequency, while an extra 15,000 (approximately) external hair cells amplify the details and accents of the frequencies. By ‘external’, we don’t mean that these cells are found coating your ear, they’re still inside the ear, and these cells are essential because they enable us to do things like tell the difference between a Z and an S; the difference between a P and T; the difference between a flute and a violin, and so on. “The chance of damaging the internal hair cells is actually minimal. Only really, really loud noises can affect them,” Erik assured us. “Your external hair cells, however, are far more sensitive. If your external hair cells are damaged then you still hear the various frequencies of sound, but your perception of the details and subtleties is either not what it used to be or has completely gone. It’s as if you can no longer hear the sharper edges of the sound wave, so sounds are much harder to distinguish from one another. This means that a violin (a sharp sawtooth sound wave) starts looking (or sounding) much like a flute (a flowing sine wave), making any violin sound like a weird flute. This makes it much more difficult to understand what someone is saying to you, especially in a more noisy environment.”

Mild Hearing Loss

People with mild hearing loss (perhaps caused by their kind of work) have damaged some of the exterior hair cells. Many musicians and audio engineers have mild hearing loss to a greater or lesser degree. By the way, genetics can also play a role, so one person can be more genetically predisposed to hearing loss than another, due to a more sensitive auditory system. Then there’s age related deafness, which Erik explains for us in more detail: “From the moment you reach thirty, you start losing around 10 decibels of hearing every ten years. This means that things need to get gradually louder in order for you to hear them clearly. If you go through life without damaging your hearing in any significant way and your hearing is only affected by natural degradation, then you won’t really notice anything until you’re around 60 years old.” But if you do have hearing damage, things are very different. “If you were exposed to cumulative hearing damage in your younger years, to the point where you’re hearing within a certain frequency range is limited, then age-related deafness will start to develop faster from the age of 30. That harder-to-hear frequency range also sits in parallel to the undamaged frequency ranges and, as a result, you’ll notice a difference by the time you reach 50 years of age, by which time you’ll have the mild deafness of a normal 60 year old.”

Hearing Tests

Maybe you’ve already had your ears tested and discovered that things aren’t quite as bad as you thought. Maybe there is a dip in a specific frequency range, but it isn’t all that bad. “In all honesty, the standard hearing test is actually too general for musicians,” comments Erik. “They measure maybe five frequencies across the whole spectrum but, with musicians, things need to be measured more finely, because they sometimes experience very sharp, very deep dips in a specific frequency range. This is very different from people who are suffering from mild deafness because they’ve worked in a noisy factory. The frequency dips they experience are far less sharp.”
These ‘sharp dips’ are normal hearing damage, at least for musicians. “It means you no longer hear specific frequencies, which also means that a certain timbre sounds different to someone with no hearing damage and that you’re no longer able to make ‘your sound’. For a musician, this can be devastating. Further from that, there is no way to compensate for that loss of frequency by ‘turning it up’. You still won’t be able to hear it and, in the meantime, it’ll actually cause physical pain. It’s a horrible thing.” If you want to measure your hearing precisely, you need to take what’s referred to as the OAE test (the ottoacoustic emission test).

Tinnitus

One of the most distressing forms of hearing damage is tinnitus. The most infamous form of tinnitus is hearing a constant beeping sound in your ear. “My clients have also told me about the other forms that tinnitus can take,” adds Erik. “Like constantly hearing a crackling or rustling noise, or a waterfall, a shower, or a running tap.” Medical science has yet to explain exactly what causes tinnitus, “But it is often compared to what’s referred to as phantom-pain, which happens to amputees where they feel pain in a limb they no longer have. An early theory was that this phenomenon was caused by fused nerves, but we now know that the problem happens in the brain. So it might be the same for tinnitus.”

There are also a few tinnitus-related horror stories. Erik tells us the story of the Belgian profession Bart Vink, a specialist on the subject, who himself was traumatised when he tried everything to treat one of his patients. “The patient wasn’t a musician but she was experiencing constant flute-like tones that were out of tune with one another and driving her crazy. After consulting with his patient, the decision was made to sever both of the nerves that connected the ears to the rest of the system. This would render the patient deaf, but the idea was that it would heal the tinnitus. Following the operation, the patient was rendered deaf, as expected, but could still hear those clashing tones. Just a few weeks later she committed suicide.” Thankfully, there are constantly new developments when it comes to treating and even partially or fully healing tinnitus, in part due to the link with phantom pain.

Hearing Rest

Playing in a band without using any hearing protection will almost certainly result in permanent hearing loss. If you do go without any hearing protection, are there any things you can do to limit the damage or even prevent it as much as possible? “Give your ears as much rest as possible between rehearsals and gigs,” Erik advises. “If you do play a gig without any hearing protection, then put in some earplugs during the break because the music they often have blaring through the PA between bands is also loud. This will give your ears a rest. Otherwise, if you can, retreat to the quiet of your dressing room backstage. On the way home, avoid listening to loud music in the car – turn it down. When you practise at home, keep the volume low as well. Try to make protecting your ears part of your discipline as a musician. Loud music can be addictive but in the end, it means you’re just continuously turning up the volume and making things worse.” According to Erik, your band rehearsals don’t always need to be amplified. “If you’re trying to figure out a three part harmony or something, there’s no need to use any microphones.”

Classical vs. Pop

Who’s at greater risk of damaging their hearing? Pop musicians or classical musicians? The answer is likely to shock you. Following an extensive study, it was discovered that classical musicians are most at risk. Why? While pop music might generally be louder, pop musicians play live less frequently and gain enough ‘ear rest’ in between, while classical musicians perform long concerts on a regular basis. So it’s not about how loud the music is but the length of exposure. Practising at home for a pop musician is also less taxing on the ears because they usually do it at a lower volume level, especially if they have neighbours. So the amplifier is usually turned down to the lowest possible setting or just switched off. But if you’re practising playing the trumpet or the violin, there is no volume knob, and those instruments are loud! Add that to the fact that classical musicians are trained to rehearse between five and six hours a day, and you can see how it all quickly adds up.

Loud is Loud

It’s even been mentioned on the news that dance festivals these days get way too loud, and you even hear some top DJs saying things like: ‘Yeah, but the sound is so good that it doesn’t cause any hearing damage.’ “That’s utter BS,” Erik insists. “Loud is loud. A decibel is still a decibel, no matter how incredible the sound quality is. On top of that, good sound quality is actually more of a risk to your hearing than bad sound quality. If you listen to an old stereo system, the sound will start to distort the moment it gets too loud for the speakers. Also, your ears actually experience distorted sound as louder than undistorted sound. This is a sort of natural protection system. These days, audio equipment and speakers can get really, really loud without distorting, meaning that your ears don’t actually experience the sound as too loud. But appearances can be deceiving and it bears repeating: decibels are still decibels. That’s the big downside of audio systems that just get better and better.”

With thanks to Erik Kempka from In-EarSystems