(no subject)
Originally published at The Null Device Blog. You can comment here or there.
Be good to your ears. A new study came out this week, showing 1 in 5 adults is suffering from noticable hearing loss.
I SAID, A NEW STUDY CAME OUT THIS WEEK SHOWING…
Ah, okay, easy joke, I’m sorry. But seriously, musicians spend an awful lot of time going over the minutiae of gear - microphone fidelity, montiors, acoustics, instruments, strings, etc etc but it all means jack and squat if you can’t hear any of it anymore.
As a musician, your ears are the most important asset you’ve got. As you age, things will start to go south on their own - you’ll experience some HF loss. This is natural - I remember as a kid being able to hear the high-pitched whine of the burglar alarms in the mall, now I pretty much can’t perceive much about 17khz (which, for someone my age, is still pretty good). So there’s that. It’s important to keep these suckers functioning properly, because it’s hard to mix and perform properly if you can’t *hear* properly. It’s like having bad speakers - if your speakers can’t reproduce high frequencies with any fidelity, the instinct is to turn them up to ear-shattering levels; the same is true with hearing loss.
In our era of earbuds and loud iPods and louder shows it’s really terribly easy to wreck your hearing even more. It’s an easy thing to do, especially if you’re a performer, because stages are loud, shows are loud, and rehearsals are loud.
It’s taken its toll on me. Like 25% of the people in my age bracket, I suffer from tinnitus, the ever-present ringing in the ears. It’s not debilitating or even really noticeable most of the time, but it’s there, and it’s a sign that somewhere along the way I messed up.
I’ve taken to travelling with a small pill container attached to my keychain, containing a pair of earplugs. I don’t have the fancy injection-molded ones - those are pricy and I’d lose them far too often - but I keep a reliable pair of 27db foam earplugs handy at all times. I’ve forgotten to wear them on a few occasions and paid for it, or I’ve lost one of them in a darkened club and felt ridiculous swapping an earplug back and forth between ears, but when I do wear them, I am incredibly glad I did.
As awesome as everything sounds cranked to 11, your ears only go up to about 8.
One thing non-obvious about hearing health is diet, exercise and alcohol. Elevated blood pressure can exacerbate (or even cause) tinnitus. Poor diet or alcohol can lead to quicker ear fatigue, and when your ears are fatigued, they just don’t hear important things as well. Worse, they don’t respond correctly to loud noises, so that pain that warns you that “these sounds are doing ear damage” might not be there. That’s bad. Of course there are obvious measures you can take too. Don’t crank up your iPod to Awesome Levels because it will do damage. Riding with the window down on your car can not only kill your gas mileage, but the low frequency wind noise is surprisingly loud and yet hard to notice.
Take care of your hearing, because once it’s gone, it’s gone…and if you’re a musician, that’s the worst thing that can happen to your music.