I smashed my finger last weekend, missing a 10 penny nail
with a 20 ounce hammer, resulting in a loud and unprintable noise. The next
day, with throbbing finger soaking in ice water, I waited on hold with Kaiser,
listening to the cheerful recorded voice periodically ask me did I know one of
every five adults suffer from some form of hearing loss?
I’m on this kinda crusade, ever
since the #2 son’s band relocated to our place and “it’s too loud” was
considered a subjective judgment and thus a subject for debate… so I bought a
decibel meter, to settle things.
Background: I like loud powerful live music. I dance through
drum solos. With the right combination of volume and pulse, I’ll dance *with*
the music emerging from the PA mains, rebounding off the sound waves like a
seagull working the ocean bluff updrafts. How-ever…there’s a point where loud
becomes too loud, where punch becomes buzz, where distinct notes and words are
lost in a sonic slush. We saw the Blasters several years back. I love the
Blasters, still do. They are Americana Rockabilly, BTW, not Death Metal, but they
were cranked up to the level where I stopped hearing music and instead heard
the sound of my eardrums rattling.
This is more than aesthetics; your sense of hearing is
getting reamed. Remember the hammer, anvil and stirrup from anatomy class? When the compressed air waves strike your
eardrum, the energy is transferred by them little bones into shock waves of
cochlear fluid, which shake the cilia hairs along the nautilus-like cochlea.
This shaking triggers nerve pulses to the brain which you understand as Dave
Alvin’s searing guitar licks.
What damages your hearing? Simply put, too much hair bending
creates hair breakdown. So when the band pushes it up to 110, 120 decibels, you
are getting an audio weed whacking, with permanent damage beginning in a minute
or less. Think of the ringing you hear after the concert as the neural
equivalent of the bleeding that precedes the scab that precedes the scar.
Yet we let it happen… why? Unlike smashing your finger,
which happens all at once and is quite painful, musical ear damage is subtle
and takes time. And maybe we think it’s uncool to do
anything about it.
What do you do? I’ve complained to the venue sound techs;
they blame it on the bands. The musicians might already be partly deaf, so
maybe it doesn’t bother them. Maybe they need to get down in the audience and
hear what we hear. Maybe they should listen to my keyboard player, who says
“loud ain’t a substitute for good.” I hope that this
column will inspire more people to do more about it.
If they won’t turn it down, then what? Forego live music? No
way. Use earplugs. You could start by using your fingers; they are easy to
quickly insert, adjust, and remove, you will never misplace them, and it sends
a message to the band and sound crew. Really cheap foam plugs are effective,
but they block the higher frequencies (it’s like sex wearing multiple condoms.)
I invest the extra $10-20 on the kind that transmit the full spectrum (check
local music stores or online.) My fantasy: studio quality sound reduction
headphones with a wireless link to the output of the sound board—you’d get a
DVD quality mix with the rest of the live music experience.
Don’t resign yourself to hearing loss. A former roadie buddy
of mine has tinnitus, where the ringing never stops. My wife had ear damage from
childhood infections; she’s less sensitive to loud concerts than I, but can’t
hear the distant owls or the murmur of a gentle rain at night. Another friend says
she feels that, because of her hearing damage, she’s been cast out of the Garden
of Eden.
An amplifier ad in a recent issue of Guitar Player magazine
read: “If it’s too loud, you’re too old!”
Fools! Mistaking volume for quality will make your ears old
before their time, turning that tagline on its ear: “If it’s too loud, you’re not
old enough.”