The IPod and MP3 player revolutionized the way we listen to music. It is possible to carry thousands of high quality songs in a super portable device. Everywhere you look, whether it is at a gym, at a school campus, in a library, or even on the street, you are bound to see numerous people with their earphones in their ears, listening to their music. Through observation, you will notice many people spend hours listening to music with the music so loud that others are able to hear the music clearly around them. People that are listening to their music loud and for prolonged periods of times are damaging their hearing. In order to understand how loud music from earphones damages hearing one must first understand how hearing works in the first place.
How does hearing work?
Diagram of the structure of ear. Shows external, middle and inner ear. Source: Temporal Bone and Ear Anatomy – Kevin Kavanagh MD
First sounds are picked up by the external ear. The sound wave pitches are then increased as the sound enters the ear canal. Next, the sound enters into the middle ear. The middle ear contains an important delicate bone structure called the ossicles. The function of the ossicles is to intensify the sound vibrations. Once the ossicles has done its job, the sound waves are moved into the inner ear. Tiny hair cells are then activated and are set in motion by the movement of fluid. These tinyhairs convert the vibrations into impulses. The impulses are then sent down the auditory nerve and the brain processes the sounds.
How do headphones harm your ear?
The main location in the ear that hearing loss occurs is the inner ear. The high energy sound waves produced by loud music in earphones or prolonged earphone use, overstimulate the fluid, causing an over stimulation in the hair cells, which results in many of these cells to die. When these hair cells die, certain frequencies of sound are no longer heard and processed by the brain. This is called hearing loss.
So how can you protect your ears?
If you regularly use your IPod and want to prevent hearing loss here these are the best preventative measures:
- The most obvious is to control the volume of the device, don’t go over 60% of the maximum volume.
- Use noise cancelling headphones so you don’t adjust the volume louder just because you are hearing background noise
- Finally, limit the use of your IPod to only one hour a day, as this the time limit stated by researchers as the optimal time for use, considering the fact that your ears are exposed to other high sound level factors such as traffic every day.
In the NBC news report below, Dr. Kourosh Parham, a ear specialist, describes preventative techniques in order to help people avoid hearing loss from earphones:
-Mandip Parmar
