Are your ears okay now?
do you know I don’t. I’m wearing noise-cancelling headphones, blocking out the passing traffic so Spotify’s Deep Focus playlist can let me do what it promises instead.
That’s great … but I can’t help but wonder: Is it damaging my hearing?
our An increasingly urban world is increasingly loudand his Making us sick.
You can safely hear noise at 85 decibels – Something like this The whir of a food processor or the ambient noise of an airplane in flight – up to eight hours. But because of the way hearing loss works, that time decreases rapidly with small increases in volume from there. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, “If the sound goes up to 88 decibels, it’s safe to listen to the same sound for four hours.” “And if the noise goes up to 91 decibels, you can safely listen for less than two hours.” As Wirecutter notes, “A rock concert that registers at 110 decibels can damage your hearing in just two minutes.” yes
Rock concerts are one thing — it may be irresponsible, but I’m willing to suffer some minor damage to listen. My favorite New York band Live in all their glory. But I’m more worried about what I do every day than I can afford live music. And while some hearing loss may be slight enough for your body to heal, if the sounds are too loud, or last too long, it can cause permanent irreversible damage. Edward Vega, my colleague on the video team, was also concerned.
“Here [worry] leading to a full-on spiral,” he said in the latest video on Vox“Where I learned the horrifying statistic that more than a billion young adults are at risk of permanent, avoidable hearing loss.”
We wear our headphones all the time – is this part of the problem? Are they damaging our hearing?
Fast Break: How Your Hearing Can Be Damaged
Don’t go too far into Science 101, but loud noises and sounds damage your hearing because sound waves are pressure waves – It vibrates the air. And in your ear, those vibrations hit your eardrum and reverberate through it, the bone around it, and the inner ear.
Past your eardrum, in your inner ear, you have hair cells that absorb that energy and convert it into information to deliver to your brain — allowing you to translate that energy into the sounds you hear.
“When your hair cells are healthy, they stand up like a field of wheat,” Dr. Amy Saro, a clinical audiologist, told Vega. And when a sound wave that’s too strong, too loud, it’s like a tornado has come and they’re all twisted up. If you’re lucky, they’re able to regenerate themselves straight, nice and long after 48 hours or so. But if you do it often, or if the noise is loud enough, the damage is permanent.”
And here’s what scared me:
“In graduate school we would actually have students come to our clinic and we would have them bring their favorite headphones and play their favorite music on their phone,” he said. And then the research team would measure the level of the sound played — “many times it was 110 decibels or it was over 100 decibels.”
Who among us hasn’t turned up the volume of our favorite music – especially if you’re trying to control a loud environment around you?
Do noise-canceling headphones actually help?
Here was my luddite fear: Somehow, when I was in that loud environment, I didn’t have noise-cancelling headphones on. really By canceling out the noise, it just drowned it out in a different way. One that can cause as many – or even more – losses.
For once, I’m happy to admit I was wrong.
Active noise cancellation — the kind of microphones that listen to the headphones’ environment and work to dampen them, like in Apple AirPods or Bose’s QuietComfort headphones — also protects your ears. They produce sound waves that are exactly the opposite of what the surrounding environment is producing, and the two actually cancel each other out.
“It doesn’t amplify things hitting your ears. It actually reduces it,” Brent Butterworth, who spent eight years researching headphones as part of his work at Wirecutter, told Vega.
To really understand it, watch the video; Its visuals really helped me. And to learn more about how to responsibly use that noise cancellation technology and why it won’t work to protect you at those rock concerts, Check out Butterworth’s article here.
But there’s one last thing Ed told me that I find very interesting about this: with the most powerful noise-canceling headphones, some people can get what Butterworth has coined “the eardrum sucking problem.”
Vega experienced this when he bought his first pair of noise-canceling headphones in 2017. Within an hour of trying them, “my throat started to hurt,” she said, “and I felt a lot of pressure in my ears.”
Noise cancellation was likely Much stronger. It is, apparently, a real thing – or at least it feels real to your body. It is psychosomatic.
Basically, “we’re used to experiencing sound in a certain way, it’s confusing for your head,” summarizes Vega. Noise canceling mostly affects low frequencies, but high frequencies still get through. “So your brain thinks there’s something wrong, and so it’s sending all these signals that make you think there’s stress but there really isn’t.”
Is there maybe too much of a good thing? Just kidding – protect your ears. If you can afford noise-canceling headphones (even cheap ones work relatively well!), use them to reduce loud environments. And go check out Vega’s video!
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