Hey Wall Street Journal! I say boooooo to you and this worthless article on the "impending hearing health crisis." The title of the article ("Resolve to Turn Your Ipod Down") itself is rather silly, now that Ipods come with volume limits under the range of the levels that cause hearing loss. Plus, its not like earbuds or portable music is anything new: we've had the Walkman for years, and before that kids would just hold boom-boxes by their ears. Concerts have been around for ages, yet no one says "Resolve To Stop Attending Concerts." Boo.
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The article is filled with dumbed-down science bordering on faulty. They state that hair cells (which they call "little cells in our ears") are unable to regenerate. Normally this is true, although they have been shown to regenerate (under therapeutic conditions) by my lab and others (see Izumikawa et al. Nature Med 2005). They also claim that damaged hair cells undergo apoptosis, which is also not confirmed. Many people think they are phagocytosed or absorbed rather than going through the cellular processes involved in apoptosis. The article also states that it is possible for someone to listen to your ipod once at top volume and wipe out all your high frequency hearing. This is just ridiculous. A gunshot, yeah, but Ipods get to about 110-120 decibels tops (they are now limited to 100 decibels though). This is NOT loud enough to cause instantaneous hearing loss. At the worst, continuous blaring (of any sound, not just an ipod) at 120 decibels may cause some hearing loss over a long time. Hopefully, common sense dictates this is not a good idea.
Not that I'm surprised though. A survey conducted on the subject (that being, are Ipods causing hearing loss in teens) by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) has generated "evidence" that young people are going deaf due to Ipods.
Some evidence, they said, lies in a new ASHA-commissioned survey, released at Tuesday's event, about the listening habits of 1,000 adults and 301 high schoolers. Random telephone interviews found that just more than half of the youngsters and less than 40 percent of the adults had experienced at least one of four hearing-loss symptoms. Those symptoms included ringing in the ears, saying "what" or "huh" during "normal" conversation, and turning up the volume on their television or radio.
The survey doesn't attribute the symptoms directly to the portable gadgets. It merely suggests the possibility of a connection--noting, for instance, that 40 percent of both students and adults reported setting their Apple iPods at what they'd consider "somewhat loud" or "extremely loud" volume levels. When the question was broadened to MP3 players in general, that number rose to about 60 percent of teenagers and fell to about one-third of adults surveyed.
Last time I checked, 'what' and 'huh' was as ubiquitous in teenage conversation as 'like.' Also, if teens like loud music, wouldn't it follow that they prefer their TV and radio volume louder as well? Preference for loud music doesn't indicate hearing loss, neither does colloquial teenage language. Its also strange that they surveyed 3x more adults and that they relied on self-report. Wouldn't it have been pretty easy, and much more precise, to simply ask people walking by in the mall (Target, grocery store, whatever) to listen to the ipod and then set the volume to the level that they would most prefer to listen to it? And, if you wanted to do a thesis or something on the topic, it wouldn't be to difficult to then conduct a simple hearing test and then compare between age and 'volume level' groups. Boooooooo.
Anyway, take-home message? Ipods are no better or worse than any other music device. Don't blare them, and you'll be fine. On the other hand, you might as well be concerned about the noise from airplane travel, concerts, nightclubs, outdoor construction, and plenty of other things in our environment that also impact hearing. That doesn't mean we give up those things, just enjoy them wisely.
(Hat tip Bob Abu)
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I agree that sensible use is key here. Also, I am concerned about the noise from concerts, outdoor construction and the like. I'm one of those "crazy people" who wear ear protection when they move the lawn or use the snowblower. Don't forget, OSHA guidelines require hearing protection for 105 dBA exposures of one hour or more or 110 dBA exposures of 30 minutes or more. Refer to this
http://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_id=9735&p_table…
for more detail.
One reason I gave up playing acoustic drums in favor of electronic drums many years ago was the "volume problem". I'm very glad I did.
Thank you for pointing out the time thing. I have mild tinnitus and some odd "holes" in my hearing, but none of it is from concerts.
Rather, it's from YEARS of regular exposure, (i.e. *hours*) to the kinds of insanely loud noises that a B-1B can generate while having maintenance performed on it.
Yes, I did wear hearing protection, but there's limits to everything.
the ipod thing is just more junk science.
Anyone who gets their science from the WSJ should have their hearing, sight and brain activity checked.
Concerts have been around for ages, yet no one says "Resolve To Stop Attending Concerts."
Maybe they didn't use those exact words, but the parents of us baby boomers used the hearing loss argument on us at least forty years ago. In a sense the argument that rock 'n' roll, the genre, causes hearing loss was even lamer than blaming the playback device. It's as if listening to a live marching band play Sousa marches would have been fine, but listening to a different genre at the same volume would have made us deaf.
I imagine parents have been using the spectre of deafness to tell their kids to turn down the music is at least as long as radio and recording have been around.
You are just a yPid - young person in denial.
Hmm. Two things, without the limiters, it is a problem, because people actually tend to turn them up "past" where normal sound levels are, to drown out existing sounds. This means that if they normally listen to (I am making these numbers up) 80db, most people will listen to them at 130db or more. Now, the iPod may have better limits than most, but a lot of people I know never worked any place with constant noise, but *have* gone partly deaf from listening to music too loud. That said, most problems are caused by constant noise in a specific range, like jet engines, machinery, etc. Why? Because their is no recovery time between hits. Music and voices, unless played insanely loud all day long, contain variation and complexity that mean that you are not constantly stimulating the same frequencies all the time.
Oh, and I just bought myself some noise cancelation headphones to go with mine. Once snug in the ear you can turn down the sound by about 10-15% and still hear it, since it reduces the background noise that makes people turn it up by 70%. Now my biggest worry is not hearing the car about to run over me if I am walking with them. lol
But truthfully, loud music "is" a problem, its just what you define as "loud", unlike speech or singing, music *does* have some constant harmonics that don't shift as often as vocals, so its just slightly more serious that being a loud room with everyone shouting over each other, just not quite as serious as some, "Our research amazingly shows exactly what we intended it to!", would claim.