Festival Safety Pt. 1 - Hearing Safety

As someone who goes to a lot of loud live events, hearing protection is an important thing to consider. While hearing loss with age is natural, hearing loss (even temporary) from one night out is definitely not! As a generation, we are being unkind to our ears; using headphones at high volume levels and spending long periods of time in loud environments are both major ways in which we will see greater hearing loss in shorter times than the generations before us.

This doesn’t mean that we should limit the number of events we attend (because how could we?), but it does mean that investing in certain protection devices is worthwhile. Let’s talk about some hearing loss facts, and how you can combat it!

Hearing Loss Types

Technically called a temporary threshold shift, temporary hearing loss can happen when you are exposed to long-term loud noises, like a concert. This can also result in that “fun” ringing you hear after coming home, tinnitus. This temporary hearing loss is the most common situation to find yourself in, but for the sake of being thorough, I’ll quickly mention the other types of hearing loss.

Acoustic trauma happens when the ear is exposed to a sudden, loud noise in excess of 140dB. (I’ll explain the significance of dB in a moment!) This kind of shock-exposure could lead to permanent hearing loss. A permanent threshold shift can happen with extended exposure to loud noises in a specific or broad hearing range, and can lead to permanent hearing loss in that range. The ear becomes less sensitive to sounds in the damaged frequency range leading to a reduction in perceived volume.

Thresholds and Decibels

Decibels (dB) are the unit used to measure sound pressure levels (SPL). As you might expect, the higher the SPL, the louder the perceived volume. The “threshold of hearing” is the lowest level at which most people can hear, and is usually denoted as 0 dB. The next two thresholds are that of feeling and pain. The “threshold of feeling” is the level at which SPL can cause discomfort, and is usually around 118 dB (there’s some added factors like the hertz frequency, but that doesn’t really matter for the sake of this post). Finally, the “threshold of pain” can occur at an SPL of 120 dB.

Now, before I can discuss hearing care and protection, it’s important to have some context of what these decibel levels really mean and correlate to. I’ve added this handy-dandy chart that has example scenarios of noise and what the decibel level usually looks like. There is a lot of extra technical information around this, but all that is important to know is that decibels increase exponentially, not linearly, meaning that a difference of 10 dB might mean more at higher SPL levels than at the lower ones.

Hearing Care and Protection

For your convenience, I have yet another handy-dandy chart that details what the daily “permissible” hours of exposure are for different decibel levels. While you could be safely exposed to 90 dB of sound for up to 8 hours, levels reaching up to 115 dB can only take 15 minutes of exposure before becoming harmful and damaging.

So, what can you do to make sure you aren’t missing out on a full day of music or damaging your hearing? A couple things! To start with some basics, taking 15-minute “quiet breaks” every few hours and having regular hearing check-ups are simple and obvious ways to monitor your noise exposure. Other than that, having some kind of ear plug is a great way to go!

There are a small variety of ear plugs that can serve this purpose. Simple, disposable foam ear plugs can drop SPLs up to around 30 dB! These are the easiest to grab; likely any average convenience store would have some kind of foam ear plug in stock. If you’re feeling a bit more “pro” though, there are also lots of companies making special ear plugs designed for loud environments like concerts! These tend to average around 20 dB of noise reduction, but unlike regular foam ear plugs that just muffle sounds, are specially designed to reduce decibel intake while still preserving clear sound quality! This means that you can impactfully protect your ears while still being able to maintain and hear regular conversations.

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Unless you want a (semi or) permanent souvenir of hearing loss from your next show, I recommend investing in some ear plugs and keeping these hearing facts in mind! I’ll be sharing a couple brands that make these ear plugs soon on my Instagram, so be sure to check in and grab a pair asap!

**For anyone wondering, my source of information actually came from a music technology class I took last year! So consider this information “professor-approved”. I also made sure to weed out some of the extra, technical details that even I still don’t fully understand! Both charts also came from class notes.**