Should You Listen To Your Mother And Turn It Down?

Uncategorized — By Shopping Blogs on December 28, 2009 4:58 pm

The next time you are in your room blasting the latest heavy metal record or in your garage playing drums with your band and you mother tells you to keep it down, you may want to listen to her. Although it is uncool to listen to heavy metal quietly and impossible to bust into your snare solo without taking down the house, there is some truth in your mothers warning.

The bad news is that nearly 30 million Americans are affected by hearing loss. Of that 30 million, 5.2 million are between the ages of 6-19 years old. The hearing loss in this young age group is directly related to noise exposure.

You may be thinking to yourself that your music does not harm you or that it is not that big of a deal. In reality, any real lasting damage will be irreparable.

Being exposed to intense or a duration of noise can cause tinnitus, which will cause a ringing in the ears. This ringing could be short term or long term. Consider the way your ears feel after leaving a rock concert. You walk out of the arena and the drums are still beating in your head and the world sounds muffled.

This is short term tinnitus and over time will cause permanent damage. There is no coming back for noise related damage done to your hearing. Noise damages our hearing by harming the very fine hairs in the inner ear.

Before you pass this off as another scare tactic thrown at you by adults who you think just do not want to hear loud music, you should know that the largest threat to damaging your hearing is not by playing the drums too loudly.

The most dangerous sounds are high-pitched sounds which can lead to damage so bad that it becomes difficult to understand speech or low pitched sounds. In fact, almost 16 percent of Americans have impaired speech do to noise damage.

While high-pitched sounds are harmful, a constant exposure to a high volume of noise could result in permanent hearing loss. This is usually indicated by an inability to make out conversation with the person in front of you while you are in a crowded room. Background noise and the speech of a person a feet away become hard to distinguish and the damage is not fixable.

So how do you know when things are too loud? There are decibel rules that say what level is too high, but how many among us carry around instruments to measure the noise levels in a room before we enter?

Any easy rule of thumb is that if you can picture your ears as if they were your eyes and you walked into a room and wanted to squint then it is too loud. Your eyes actually dilate and naturally squint in order to protect themselves. Unfortunately, our ears are wide open to receive every sound, for better or worse.

So consider the benefits of turning your radio down by even ten decibels or padding the garage drums so the sound is not to loud. You will still be able to enjoy your friends and music and in 20 years you will still be able to hear what they are saying to you.

You can still enjoy your rock concert with sick drums and wild mosh pits. But to make things safer, you could insert ear plugs into your ears. You will still be able to hear everything, just at a safer level.

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Tags: Drums